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HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
21–30 of 233 posts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#22Regarding the closing statement: I think, a major, now mostly forgotten influence were CD-ROMs and an ambition to match those.
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Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#23I'm not sure "shaped the Internet" is the right description. These are 10 HTML/CSS hacks that enabled you to work around browser quirks and poor support for certain features.
Yeah. I was hoping for a list of hacks that got promoted to standards. That would have been a really cool read.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#24> Why it was useful: Because Internet Explorer was trash Great insight
Specifically: IE6 was trash. Microsoft had won the browser war, but at the same time the dotcom crash and antitrust action over the tight integration between IE and Windows caused Microsoft to stop investing in it.
Did they ever invest much into it? As far as I understand they got the core components from Spyglass Inc. and avoided paying licensing fees by giving it away for free.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#25wow - this was a great walk down memory lane. I remember using all of them, particularly tables for creating complicated layouts. it worked beautifully but was an unbelievable pain to maintain when making layout changes. what's wild though is that this technique eventually went way beyond the category of "hack". slicing tables into layout became officially supported by major software such as dreamweaver (big at the time) and photoshop! yes, you could open a static design in photoshop and use the "slice tool" to cut it up into an HTML table. good times...
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#26I like how HN employs one of these today: - Use HTML tables for layout Hahaha :) On a more serious note, this list highlights how development without standards leads to control information being encoded in various tolerable side-channels. The potential mess and collision of this brings into relief the disdain that's sometimes levelled at the current W3C process. This process marries a standards-driven evolution of we…
>On a more serious note, this list highlights how development without standards leads to control information being encoded in various tolerable side-channels.
I don't think it's a lack of standards, it's more of a lack of necessary functionality. If the thing you want to do isn't an addressed feature, you'll do it one way or another creatively. Standards provide rigidity that create this situation to begin with unless the standard is mature enough that it captures all the potential needs, especially in cases like the web where your often locked to some standard that may or may not suit your needs. In other spaces, you usually have enough options that one thing or another is flexible enough you can do what you need to do and go with that choice.
Having worked in research long enough you'd be surprised how often something someone wants to do requires some hacky technology approach because many standards exist around business/consumer interaction and systems built around that, because that's where the money is which drives those standards and feature sets.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#27> Remember when our browsers defaulted to gray backgrounds? That was weird, right?
better than white themes we have today
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#28Remember when we rounded corners using images placed at each corner.
It was a nightmare.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#29> Why it was useful: Because Internet Explorer was trash Great insight
I really hated IE with a passion.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#30> Remember when our browsers defaulted to gray backgrounds? That was weird, right? better than white themes we have today
The best part is going between two dark themed sites at night and get a blinding bright flash as a transition.