Small nitpick, DHTML is Dynamic HTML, not Distributed HTML.
Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
171–180 of 354 posts
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#172Forgot page counters.
/cgi-bin
ColdFusion
Absence of alpha-channel on gifs so having to match the background color.
But yes, it was the wild-wild-west of security holes out there! The amount of genius it takes to create a new web exploit these days is astonishingly high compared to 1994.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#173Don't forget slicing images for dropshadows and rounded corners.
And the real pros used dithered transparend gifs.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#174The awesome thing about that period was how we learned. You'd be on a web page, see something funky (positioning, rounded corners, etc) and be like "how the heck did they do that?". Then you do the ol' "View Source" and now that technique is in your toolkit. In fact you'd prob head right over to your geocities site and try it out right away.
This is the thing I miss the most. View-Source was the source of truth. No JavaScript filling in empty s bullshit, No minifying, no uglifying.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#175> I miss the good ol’ days. Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of JavaScript, of all things
It seems I learnt HTML just between these two eras. After the , 1px spacers and tables, and before the piles of abstractions.
People cared about doing well formed XHTML and having those W3C Valid XHTML badges, and also those "install Firefox" buttons.
This was short so today everything looks ugly to me, old and new, in different ways.
I still use (polyglot) XHTML5 (HTML5 if I don't control everything being input) and avoid frontend frameworks and web fonts when I get to decide. This is a world where implementing a search bar for people who haven't discovered CTRL+F yet takes 30 lines of dumb Javascript and filters 200 items in 1 second on a slow computer without any caching trick and that does not require minifiers and bundlers. Which does not actually sound impressive, or shouldn't anyway. A world where when you disable Javascript, the page is still perfectly readable. A world where a silly mistake in the HTML markup is noticed.
To build an actual web application where it does not makes much sense to have the content as a web page, I started liking Svelte but I'll still at least consider doing things by manipulating the DOM directly before deciding.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#1761x1 pixel GIFs are still in use on places like Amazon where the 1x1 GIF image is overlayed on top of another (larger) image. It's to stop people right-clicking and saving the larger image to their device (because copyright). Anyways I can just press F12 and 'steal' the image from devtools, so it's not hard to overcome.
I believe that tracking pixels (1x1) are still very popular for mining browsing activity
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#177That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML" — I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".
Maybe they were confusing it with DCOM (distributed COM) which was often talked about around that time.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#178I miss when about: pages were useful and universal. Nowadays every browser has their own internal scheme and have dropped about:
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#179Wow. That took me back. All those things, every day. And table layouts of course. And let's not forget slicing images, and slapping those into tables too. If I remember rightly, Photoshop had an "export to slices" thing built in. Amazing. Loved it. And of course one of the biggest issues with today's web: you can't just view source and copy paste. You're in the land of chasing back up CSS files, js libraries, or find…
I used to build entire sites in photoshop. It produced horrendous mark-up, but streamlined the whole design process, and allowed for really beautiful graphic designs. Haven't done web development in well over a decade, but I assume from your comment this is no longer a thing?
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#180The author forgot making rounded corners using images! I kind of miss the creativity of old web development, especially before responsive web design. There was so much more variation and most sites didn't look like the default bootstrap template. But there were a lot of bad things about this era, particularly non standard browsers