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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

zachholman.com

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Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#131

Post by dabent »

In the mid-90s I discovered HTML and cleaned up the web page for the company I was contracting for. It was supposed to be a 5-hour a week side project that became 20 hours a week often. I discovered David Seigel's web site, where I learned all the magic of the single-pixel gif and table layouts. I bought his book "Creating Killer Websites," and followed his web journal, which was a new concept at the time.

I took a detour for a bit, working on server-side projects in C++ and Java, but came back to a new world of CSS and for a time was quite confused. Certainly our tools for creating killer websites have improved, but I have very fond memories of those early days.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#132

Post by furyofantares »

studio816 wrote: post #75
mpclark wrote: post #25

We weren't web developers back then, we were web masters

and we didn't build a website, we built a homepage.

I thought homepage was just whatever page you had your browser set to start up on. And then some of us built personal home pages that had all the links we cared about on them. And then one of us built Personal Home Pages.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#133

Post by studio816 »

alttab wrote: post #98
studio816 wrote: post #84

My first website was hosted on a free angelfire.com account. Or was it geocities? Maybe both, but it certainly had a lot of blinking gifs and photoshop-sliced buttons with rollover affects.

My dad would use rollover images for his buttons. To get the responsiveness he needed, he preloaded all the images by displaying them 1x1 pixel at the bottom of the page.

that... makes me feel very old, and I'm 32 :(

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#134

Post by tracker1 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #35

Needs a section on the joys of tables. Possibly my favorite bug ever: HTML has a weird relationship with whitespace; usually it doesn't matter much, except when it does: http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol7/html_no1.htm This is one of the few bugs I've encountered that still makes me angry to this day. I spent so much time trying to figure it out.

Ugh.. the rendering bugs.. when combining tables and divs... IE for the longest time had a bug where combining table and div elements nested, when exceeding a certain complexity, you'd just get a white screen... It was fixed in IE6 on XP, but not on earlier versions of windows.

That was a nightmare of support issues on a few apps for me.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#135

Post by Swannie »

dkoch wrote: post #40

What about CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive [1] which amazingly is still alive? [1] http://www.scriptarchive.com/

Yes yes yes! You were a webmaster based on the article posted.

You were a web developer if you'd torn apart and rebuild Matt's Forum, Poll, and other widgets.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#136

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

joshvm wrote: post #130

My old CRT had amazingly high resolution given that it was only 17" or something. Of course you couldn't really see much at 1600x1200, but it could do it!

This was what jumped out at me. People have short memories; screen resolutions have not really improved in the last 15 years, and possibly aren't still as high as the rate they were at in the late 90s. Of course, they've improved in other, very obvious ways.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

#139

Post by teebrz »

dkoch wrote: post #40

What about CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive [1] which amazingly is still alive? [1] http://www.scriptarchive.com/

Hearing "DHTML" reminded me of Thomas Brattli's old site[1] and it's successor dhtmlcentral. I learned quite a bit from those sites in the late 90s early 00s.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20001019064945/http://www.bratta...

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