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

A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

blog.froont.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–28 of 28 posts

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#21

Post by dismal2 »

Animats wrote: post #17

The amusing thing about web design trends is the dislike of tables, followed by the creation of CSS and JavaScript hacks to create columnar web design. Tables are now back, but they're called "layout tables". What's been lost are the good page layout tools that didn't require manually writing HTML and CSS. Macromedia Dreamweaver once allowed laying out a page without even looking at HTML source. Now, you can't even b…

There are still Dreamweaver like tools, they are just terrible and produce completely unmaintainable code that doesn't work with anything other than simple static sites. If anything tools like Dreamweaver/Frontpage were made obsolete by Wordpress and services like Squarespace, etc.

Also, I'm not sure what you are really referring to in your first paragraph or what the fact that you can only rent Dreamweaver (true for the entire Adobe Suite) has to do with anything.

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#22

Post by thomasfl »

sosuke wrote: post #15

Neat start, but so many holes! JavaScript didn't take off for years, jQuery didn't come about 2006, and arguably the real start of the JavaScript "renaissance" was Prototype in 2005. CSS grid layouts got their start in around 2004, trying to finally replace tables for presentation. The larger CSS frameworks started in 2006 or so. Flash didn't even really take off until the Flash MX 2004 with the release of ActionScri…

Yes, the history of web development is easily forgotten. JavaScript was basically considered pretty useless by many web developers before Prototype and jQuery came and provided a compatibility layer that fixed browser differences. It was not worth the effort to add javascript to your html because no one had any confidence that it would work in all types of browsers. It's less than 10 years ago.

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#24

Post by Spearchucker »

thomasfl wrote: post #22
sosuke wrote: post #15

Neat start, but so many holes! JavaScript didn't take off for years, jQuery didn't come about 2006, and arguably the real start of the JavaScript "renaissance" was Prototype in 2005. CSS grid layouts got their start in around 2004, trying to finally replace tables for presentation. The larger CSS frameworks started in 2006 or so. Flash didn't even really take off until the Flash MX 2004 with the release of ActionScri…

Yes, the history of web development is easily forgotten. JavaScript was basically considered pretty useless by many web developers before Prototype and jQuery came and provided a compatibility layer that fixed browser differences. It was not worth the effort to add javascript to your html because no one had any confidence that it would work in all types of browsers. It's less than 10 years ago.

In South Africa JavaScript took off like crazy in the late 90's. Netscape was still big then. Here's a thing I built in 1997 - it was a side project I used to teach myself JavaScript -

http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/mobile/

Choose "Handsets" from the top menu, and play around with manufacturers and network types to narrow the list of cellphones

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#25

Post by notahacker »

sosuke wrote: post #18
Animats wrote: post #17

The amusing thing about web design trends is the dislike of tables, followed by the creation of CSS and JavaScript hacks to create columnar web design. Tables are now back, but they're called "layout tables". What's been lost are the good page layout tools that didn't require manually writing HTML and CSS. Macromedia Dreamweaver once allowed laying out a page without even looking at HTML source. Now, you can't even b…

Please point me to something about "layout tables" because I haven't hear of or seen a resurgence of layouts.

I'm not sure many people refer to "layout tables", but a significant proportion of the online "grid systems" and "frameworks" are dedicated to essentially producing the same functionality as etc. in a more verbose, less reliable manner, using HTML classes, CSS and the odd JS hack.

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#26

Post by bbcbasic »

Animats wrote: post #17

The amusing thing about web design trends is the dislike of tables, followed by the creation of CSS and JavaScript hacks to create columnar web design. Tables are now back, but they're called "layout tables". What's been lost are the good page layout tools that didn't require manually writing HTML and CSS. Macromedia Dreamweaver once allowed laying out a page without even looking at HTML source. Now, you can't even b…

Unfortunately you kind of have to understand a lot about the HTML and CSS to make sure the layout will be correct on a dizzing combination of actual resolutions, fake resolutions, screen sizes, aspect ratios, "finger sizes" and viewer distances. All without a reliable way to find out most of that information. :-|

However there is always the burger to the rescue.

☰ <- yum!

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#27

Post by notahacker »

sandijs wrote: post #7
vital wrote: post #5

You missed Web 2.0, around 2004, the rise of AJAX.

True. I also left out Frames. Web 2.0 for me was too much about aesthetics, but AJAX is very close to JS. Both deserve a spot in an extended version of the history though!

"Web 2.0" was a lot less about aesthetics than "flat design" (the emergence of custom font solutions that didn't require Flash or graphics was the real revolution; the "flat"-ness itself is just a fad, and for that matter HN has been pretty flat looking for a while now!)

The browser wars deserved a mention, probably in the Javascript section too, and the death of the "web safe" palette.

Embedded video everywhere is probably the biggest boon to designers in recent years, even if it's been theoretically achievable since Flash came onto the scene. Or earlier if you count animated gifs

Re: A Brief History of Web Design for Designers

#28

Post by Animats »

notahacker wrote: post #25
sosuke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please point me to something about "layout tables" because I haven't hear of or seen a resurgence of layouts.

I'm not sure many people refer to "layout tables", but a significant proportion of the online "grid systems" and "frameworks" are dedicated to essentially producing the same functionality as etc. in a more verbose, less reliable manner, using HTML classes, CSS and the odd JS hack.

That's what gets me. The div/float/clear approach, which is one-dimensional, is a poor match to "modern grid layouts". Elaborate CSS gimmicks are needed to fake it. Here are four of them: http://www.sitepoint.com/easy-responsive-css-grid-layouts/ One just uses tables.

Now we have "grid" as a primitive in CSS. Inevitably, it needs a special case for some versions of Internet Explorer. There's "grid", and there's "-ms-grid". Here's the W3C spec.

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/

It's a lot like tables, but it uses different terminology and has some extra bells and whistles, so that makes it OK.

Post reply on HN