Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Top Web Design Styles of 1993

contemporary-home-computing.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–17 of 17 posts

Re: Top Web Design Styles of 1993

#11

Post by ajxs »

mg1c wrote: post #4
joegibbs wrote: post #3

Don't forget that it's about as long since this blog post was written to today as from 1993. The idea of making webpages in Photoshop and using a lot of gradients is something that today sounds very quaint - people say society's stagnated since then but that's something where it's definitely not true.

Surprised to see Dreamweaver still on Adobe's website; I remember being taught website design with it during computer class back in the late 2000s, definitely a completely different paradigm to the modern web.

If you think that's surprising, what about the fact that they're still maintaining ColdFusion? https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

Re: Top Web Design Styles of 1993

#14

Post by masswerk »

ajxs wrote: post #10
joegibbs wrote: post #3

Don't forget that it's about as long since this blog post was written to today as from 1993. The idea of making webpages in Photoshop and using a lot of gradients is something that today sounds very quaint - people say society's stagnated since then but that's something where it's definitely not true.

Around the time this page was written I was still building enormously graphic-rich websites in Adobe Flash, which was my first introduction to real programming . For whatever reason, despite most of Flash's functionality being incorporated into (and deployment issues being resolved by) modern Javascript, I've done a complete 180 and gone in the other direction. All of my hobby web-design is completely Spartan in comp…

There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.

(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)

[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.

Re: Top Web Design Styles of 1993

#16

Post by mock-possum »

masswerk wrote: post #14
ajxs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around the time this page was written I was still building enormously graphic-rich websites in Adobe Flash, which was my first introduction to real programming . For whatever reason, despite most of Flash's functionality being incorporated into (and deployment issues being resolved by) modern Javascript, I've done a complete 180 and gone in the other direction. All of my hobby web-design is completely Spartan in comp…

There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with…

I made pretty good money as a freelance flex dev circa 2015, I miss it sometimes.

Re: Top Web Design Styles of 1993

#17

Post by chews »

ajxs wrote: post #11
mg1c wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised to see Dreamweaver still on Adobe's website; I remember being taught website design with it during computer class back in the late 2000s, definitely a completely different paradigm to the modern web.

If you think that's surprising, what about the fact that they're still maintaining ColdFusion? https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

ColdFusion is the COBOL of web programming… there is some human at an insurance/mortgage servicing company thats not had to learn a new tag in 5 years pulling in 200k.
Post reply on HN