The font size on this site is huge. Why do blogs now follow this?
Because it's easier to read.
HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
211–220 of 233 posts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Golly. It’s a bit of a slap in the face to click through to A List Apart and see the header broken on mobile. It’s still so clean though after all these years.
you mean the title cut off? it happens on desktop too. i wonder if it's intentional
Yes, it is intentionally their design.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#213The amount of conflation between "the Internet" and "the Web" is way too high in here. It is the most popular protocol, but it is not the only protocol.
The amount of conflation between "The Web" and "HTTP" is way too high in here. "The Web" is not a protocol.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#214I 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 unles…
Yeah, that's a fair point. But normally standards imply functionality. And if something's useful enough that people are inventing creative ways to achieve it, it would likely be standardized, if there's a process to do so. So, the issue about a standard process remains.
It's not really possible to separate that from functionality.
Your point about the potential rigidity of standards is well taken. However, it’s important to note that a standard, by its nature, doesn’t necessarily have to be rigid and inflexible in a way that hinders progress or creativity. Standards can be designed with adaptability in mind, providing a stable foundation while still allowing for innovation and flexibility. This balanced approach ensures that standards serve as helpful guidelines, not as constraints that stifle growth or possibilities.
Your final point about the practical realities where standards rubber meets the road, so to speak, is also a good one. But there's a distinction between the type of standards you might be referring to, such as in manufacturing or quality assurance, and web. In the former, standards indeed can produce this kind of regulatory capture or bloated compliance industry, and associated restriction on innovation and competition. And on the other hand, the type of standards that we mean when we talk about the web, even though it's the same word, I think they're very distinct in fundamental ways.
Although they share the same terminology, web standards tend to be more about enabling interoperability, innovation, and accessibility, rather than imposing restrictive regulations. However, restrictions do occur and they are sometimes abused, seemingly by big vendors to enhance their value capture by penalizing alternatives in the name of “user safety”. In that sense, web standards can share the “corruption of standards” which I think is invoked by your last point.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
IE had a setting that forced tables to render progressively. They documented it on the Microsoft web dev site and also I’m reasonably sure in their “cool things you can do in IE5.5” book.
Didn't know that! Wonder what made them choose to turn this off by default. Must be an interesting eng story.
I used it and it almost progressively updated too often - like cell by cell, so it wasn’t very pretty. So you kind of had to know when to use it and when not to.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#216Using tables for layout is pretty understandable. But when tables went out of fashion it was all about using floats for layout for a few years. That was wild, I am surprised it was left out from that list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou... "Originally for floating images inside blocks of text, the float property became one of the most commonly used tools for creating multiple column layo…
I was going to comment that I took offense to calling table-based layout a hack in the first place. When tables went out of favor, and I saw many, many front end dev teams waste cumulative months of time creating a much less understandable web page fiddling with float nonsense all over the place, solely so "purists" could keep their religion in tact, I learned a valuable lesson. Joel Spolsky calls them "Architecture…
Floats were ugly but once you did enough of them, you could nail it every time. It shouldn’t have taken months if you had an experienced team.
The only issue with floats was that there were a lot of edge cases that happened in only certain browsers, so you had to be careful. Lots of browser bugs.
Job security.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to comment that I took offense to calling table-based layout a hack in the first place. When tables went out of favor, and I saw many, many front end dev teams waste cumulative months of time creating a much less understandable web page fiddling with float nonsense all over the place, solely so "purists" could keep their religion in tact, I learned a valuable lesson. Joel Spolsky calls them "Architecture…
what do you mean by "purists" wrt tables? not nesting them or something? or using them only for marking up "relational" data and not page layout? or were these purists from the design side?
Tables semantically are meant to represent tabular data and using them for layout became “wrong.”
From a practical point of view too, if you wanted to make separate mobile and desktop views just by using different stylesheets, using a table made it very difficult.
(That said, in 2000, if you were using separate mobile and screen stylesheets, you were in an extreme minority because there were relatively few full HTML web browsers on mobile devices. Instead, most phones, if they could access the Internet, accessed a different version of the Internet accessed over WAP.)
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#218I remember the good old days of the transparent 1×1 pixel gif to keep table cells in check.
I used to slice large images in a grid pattern, held by a table. Don't even remember why... For faster loading?
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#219Using tables for layout is pretty understandable. But when tables went out of fashion it was all about using floats for layout for a few years. That was wild, I am surprised it was left out from that list. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/CSS_layou... "Originally for floating images inside blocks of text, the float property became one of the most commonly used tools for creating multiple column layo…
the time after table
layouts and before flex and grid really sucked. table layouts sucked too but at least they made sense lol
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#220They were dark days. This is why I get agitated about browsers that don't properly support CSS standards in the present day, most notably Safari mobile. Garbage browser that should be illegal.