221–230 of 407 posts
While there were more elaborate Perl CGI libraries, I preferred to use cgi-lib.pl.
[nav bar ...]
[link1 ] content ...
[link...] content ...
All sites looked like a variation of this. Normally people were OCD so everything was carefully contained in its own box. This was kind of the opposite to today's 'flat design.' Where today everything blends seamlessly and the edges are implied by contrasts older sites didn't try hide their boundaries.
There wasn't really many front-end libraries. Front-end was mostly just templates and PHP. Large-scale web software was all just PHP + templates + HTML with minimal javascript. PHP was quite instrumental for the early for the early web. It's still huge honestly.
By the way: lets not forget that Git only came out in 2005 and that had a significant effect on how software was managed. The version control before them was painful and web devs weren't always the kind of engineers to use them.
I also remember being enamored by image maps. Mapping out the polygons without software was beyond the confidence I had as an 11 year old.
And a self-hosted CGI-backed counter--the holy grail.
> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”, was the final feather in our cap of web development tools. Dynamic* Anyway, there's also tables for layout, including Photoshop and Dreamweaver having a slice tool to generate those tables. Also most of the coolest early adopter sites using CSS were anime artist portfolios, because it allowed them to do much cooler stuff. Webpage view counters. Midi files playing when you…
Thanks for the trip down memorylane. Related, although not a website, sub7 was loads of fun too.
Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners. Or maybe I'm an early 00s web developer with that? The trick is that we created 3×3 tables, and aside of the middle cell, it would contain s, so that the creation was a website element with rounded edges, the pinnacle of human expressiveness. Since HTML emails were also the rage, and email clients updated much slower than browsers, this technique was used we…
I remember slicing and dicing up the rounded corners in photoshop.
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At the time it was more about being able to load more content without having to do a whole-page fetch. This was around when XHR first debuted and devs could stop relying on hacks or Flash to do it.
DHTML was long before XHR; the term was more or less already out of fashion by the time XHR came along. DHTML was used for situations like when you had hierarchical selects where the contents of the second select depended upon what you picked for the first select. All the code and data was delivered up front with the page load; you didn’t go back to the server for it with XHR.
The ability to pull down new results and load them was largely enabled by DHTML, though, because you still need a way to update the page with the new data. But now that I'm more awake I agree DHTML and the unrelated web2.0 features are different things.
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Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT to write the CSS for me for that, and amusingly, it seems to be able to produce at least a dozen of solutions (often came with redundant rules, too: like having 5+ rules when 2 or 3 of them are enough). It's hilariously stupid.
That's not stupid, it's just redundancy to make sure it works on all browsers!
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I don't understand. I'm interested what this means.
We’d generate a 18x1 GIF with a gradient color change (or from a solid color to a transparent color) and stretched that out over however pixels we wanted to create a gradient-like effect. e.g
> Sites like Dynamic Drive meant that instead of thinking through creative solutions for problems you face, you could just copy and paste this 50 line block of code and everything would be fixed.
DHTML in this context stood for Dynamic HTML, not “distributed”, hence the Dynamic of Dynamic Drive.