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Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

retro.social

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Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#51

Post by JimDabell »

mcphage wrote: post #49

> back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absol…

They did, in fact, design CSS to implement this kind of design easily. You were able to implement that in a simple way without any weird hacks using only the functionality in CSS 2.0, published in 1998.

Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer back in those days, it was several years after that before web developers could count on it.

If it weren’t for Microsoft abandoning Internet Explorer development for five entire years once they got a browser monopoly, you could’ve been doing this in a much simpler way more than a decade sooner.

You’re blaming the W3C for not putting an easy way to do it into the standard but they did put it into the standard. It’s just what they put into the standard didn’t matter – Internet Explorer had >90% market share so Microsoft didn’t care about the standards and paralysed the industry for over a decade.

A truly vast amount of the weird hacks we had to do back then was simply papering over the shortcomings of Internet Explorer.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#53

Post by marssaxman »

mcphage wrote: post #49

> back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absol…

I have heard that web design is supposed to be tractable again, but I could not stand CSS with all its spooky-action-at-a-distance unpredictability, and did not have the years of patience it would have taken to get through the growing pains, so I haven't had anything to do with web work in over twenty years now. Oh, well! It was fun in the late '90s, at least.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#54

Post by Retric »

lostlogin wrote: post #40
Retric wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a bad phone, poor battery life, fragile, and relatively poor reception. That was more than offset by the unmetered internet connection + decent browser, but that’s a feature not everything.

> It was a bad phone It got a bit of traction, I think they did ok. Out of interest I checked. I live in New Zealand and iPhone revenue is about 60% more than my countries GDP.

That’s the brand not a specific device these days Apple is selling well over 200 million phones a year.

The original iPhone sold 6.1 million units in its lifetime and topped out at the 3rd most popular phone in the US, being dramatically less popular in Europe etc. IE less than 2% of current annual sales.

By comparison just the base model iPhone 15 was the most popular phone globally for 3 quarters excluding the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 15 Pro which where close. Part of that is just being a way better phone in terms of battery life and being significantly more resistant to water etc.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#57

Post by pseudalopex »

dwedge wrote: post #50
mcphage wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I reminded me of the tweet about how people online invent someone doing a hypothetical situation and then get mad at them You really think that bit was hypothetical?!

Of course it was. The whole article was written in a hypothetical structure. "You do this, then that happens"

It was written in 2nd person structure. 2nd person and hypothetical are different ideas.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#58

Post by pllbnk »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #39

He's missing the last step: Somehow around the 2010s we all decided that everything in the web had to become "reactive" and "asynchronous" - which is a fancy way of saying things can theoretically happen at any time but realistically if you try to make it happen in ways that don't resemble the previous serial approach you get weird race conditions - and instead of making sure this was implemented in HTML now we have…

I have been building a small web app for my family recently. I was planning to host it on my own server and not do any fancy reactive and asynchronous stuff. It was a simple multi-page app with simple forms and links. And it sucked because we didn’t know who was doing what live, we needed to refresh pages needlessly just to see if something has changed. Funny that it seemed fine while I have been the only user testing the app but once we got more family members in what seemed like “production ready” it was immediately obvious that it needed interactivity.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#59

Post by icedchai »

JimDabell wrote: post #51
mcphage wrote: post #49

> back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absol…

They did, in fact, design CSS to implement this kind of design easily. You were able to implement that in a simple way without any weird hacks using only the functionality in CSS 2.0, published in 1998. Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer ba…

CSS was the worst part of the HTML/CSS/JS combo. It was easier to build layouts with tables, 1995 style, for a very long time.

Re: Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026

#60

Post by queenkjuul »

JimDabell wrote: post #28
benj111 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 'real' web are you going to get on a 1.5in phone screen? What real web are you going to get when there's no 3g, much less a reliable signal on a lot of places. Wap worked well for actually relaying information.

The original iPhone had a 3.5” screen, Wi-Fi, and EDGE. The iPhone 3G came a year later, with, shockingly, 3G. So yeah, that web browser that actually worked did actually work. Sure, it was slow compared with today’s speeds, but giving people what they want slowly matters far more than giving people what they don’t want marginally faster. Remember most people were on dial-up at home back in those days so the web was…

Nobody that was paying for mobile data in 2007 was still using dial-up at home, at least not in the US, and they'd been using broadband at work and at school for at least a few years before that, too
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