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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

zachholman.com

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Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#21

Post by mauricioc »

xnorswap wrote: post #3

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” Is this a joke I don't understand?

The whole page is tongue-in-cheek. In the '90s, was only supported by Netscape while was only supported by Internet Explorer, so combining the two didn't make a lot of sense. Mozilla only added support in 2002: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156979.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#22

Post by kqr »

Wait, I still use dotted underlines and   on my blog, and it does get praise for its design.

The dotted underlines look nice, but I guess the   is just something I used to add to work around layout quirks in Internet Explorer except I never bothered figuring out in which places they're no longer needed...

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#25

Post by metaxy2 »

frereubu wrote: post #5
xnorswap wrote: post #3

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” Is this a joke I don't understand?

Yeah, I think there's some deliberate mistakes in there for understated comic effect - e.g. "To this day [1x1.gif] is the only way to vertically center elements." The joke (at least the DHTML one) is probably that only people who were developers then will know that's wrong. (Or I suppose this could have been written by someone who wasn't around at that time and this is a bit of faux nostalgia!)

I think the joke about it being "the only way to vertically center elements" is just referring to the fact that it's still kind of hard to do vertical centering and there's still no definitive, easy solution after 27 years of CSS. (It's now doable with Flexbox or CSS Grid as well as more obscure hacks, but it's still more fiddly than it should be.) Could be wrong, though.

Edit: I think thejohnconway has the answer [1]: the post was written before the Flexbox stuff for vertical centering was widely supported.

There were still less nasty options than 1x1 GIFs available, like "display: table-cell", so it's still very likely a joke.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127936

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#27

Post by Scotrix »

xnorswap wrote: post #3

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” Is this a joke I don't understand?

I guess the joke here is that you used to do really a lot of in-line JavaScript in HTML, there was even a time during high latency where it was better to use inline JavaScript than JavaScript imports () for faster rendering times (you usually just had 2 concurrent connections with high latency and low bandwidth). So “distributing” your JavaScript in a single HTML all over the place was the way and fail to go :-)

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#28

Post by arkh »

jeswin wrote: post #17

I don't remember if this was a common technique, but before XmlHttpRequest (came in 2000, i think) we used to do "Ajax" by loading data into an invisible iframe and reading the contents. Worked well iirc.

> reading the contents

Or having some javascript code in the page loaded by the iframe which could call some parent. function.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#29

Post by cwdegidio »

esafak wrote: post #9

Don't forget image slicing and image maps! https://www.creativebloq.com/adobe/image-slicing-photoshop-6... (2014)

My first paying client when I was 19 (so around 1998?) commissioned a local high school graphic design student to hand paint this crazy village scene with stores. She then had it professionally scanned and gave me the files... which I then used to create an image map for each of her little "store fronts". She couldn't accept payments online (they didn't teach me that in my community college HTML course), still had to print out an order form and send in a check. I will never forget the horrid repeated plaid background she made me use.

I miss the early ugly web lol.

Re: Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

#30

Post by johnchristopher »

I have a rather large website to manage. Based on Tailwind. There are still some fucking    and tags around because the original dev used layout all those text containers over image containers and wasn't told there would one day be no text.

N+1 still loves those 1x1 transparent GIF for newsletters.

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