What offices with doors?
Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
61–70 of 354 posts
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#62A 90s page isn't a 90s page without an animated gif of man digging a hole with "under construction".
Obligatory: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#63> The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links. I don't know how this trend came to be. I fought it for as long as I could, links are underlined and when you hovered them the underline would go away to make it extra clear this is an interactive element. I considered it a staple of good design. Why did we remove the underline?
I think that's because the underline makes the text hard to read especially in badly designed fonts.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#64Wow. That took me back. All those things, every day. And table layouts of course. And let's not forget slicing images, and slapping those into tables too. If I remember rightly, Photoshop had an "export to slices" thing built in. Amazing. Loved it. And of course one of the biggest issues with today's web: you can't just view source and copy paste. You're in the land of chasing back up CSS files, js libraries, or find…
> you can't just view source and copy paste
My highschool computer curriculum was basically a hacker school program for web dev stretched across three years (senior year we did VB6). I managed to be impressive because I would dissect web pages to learn their tricks. I think I must be the only one (or if not, at least among the first) in our level to pull off columned layout without CSS. I figured out all by myself, neither the books nor the teachers taught you that. And I did that by reading source code on IE5---developer tools weren't a thing then!
In our second year, one of the exercises was to recreate Yahoo's log-in page. I got closest exactly because of the above. I still feel smug remembering this.
Golden times, indeed. :)
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#651x1 pixel GIFs are still in use on places like Amazon where the 1x1 GIF image is overlayed on top of another (larger) image. It's to stop people right-clicking and saving the larger image to their device (because copyright). Anyways I can just press F12 and 'steal' the image from devtools, so it's not hard to overcome.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#66Placing table tags beside or below parent tags rendered differently.
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#67They have missed out Perl CGI scripts from “Matts Script Archive”[0]! I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes). Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms! Edit: wow cg…
CGI Proxy takes me back for exactly the reason you describe - bypassing filters on the school network :-)
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#681x1 pixel GIFs are still in use on places like Amazon where the 1x1 GIF image is overlayed on top of another (larger) image. It's to stop people right-clicking and saving the larger image to their device (because copyright). Anyways I can just press F12 and 'steal' the image from devtools, so it's not hard to overcome.
> places like Amazon
And places like this site right here, where it provides indentation for comments among other things! Search the source for `s.gif` - https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where are the browser games built with Html5 to compare with the Cambrian explosion of Flash games that everyone and their brother made circa 2000-2010? Like all things, it's been made more difficult and the authoring tools are worse.
>Where are the browser games built with Html5 I'd say they're all on mobile making money through IAPs vs some freely distributed game on a website. > it's been made more difficult and the authoring tools are worse. With the prolific amount of titles on mobile, I'd say they found the better platform to build on. However, you never answered the question as asked. Whataboutism runs amuck. What could you do in Flash that…
The developer experience is just subpar. I believe this is a big factor why there's far less amateur content today. In terms of multimedia, I was able to do more with my 512MB Windows XP on rust-prone spinning disks and Flash 8 than my 32GB SSD-based Ubuntu LTS. The former was also programmed by a highschool student; the latter, same highschool student but with a CS degree and almost a decade of industry experience.
Back then, I could rapidly prototype a small Flash project, maybe 10 scenes (is that the term then?). Today, yeah it's easy to get started but you have a project that's bit more than 3 scenes and you need to use webpack if you want any hope of keeping things organized.
Distribution-wise, Flash packaging is just superior. You can even make it an .exe to share with your friends (security be damned; that's what I did then). To distribute your HTML5 project you basically need a webserver and send your link around and hope they open it in a compatible browser (if they use a Mac with Safari, you better hope you didn't use too much cutting edge APIs). I guess today you could also use Electron, equivalent to me exporting to exe, but that's another battery that's sold separately.
Plus, animation is just loads better with a WYSIWYG editor like Flash. HTML5 is powerful but anything more than a simple motion tween and I have to pull up a pen and paper to calculate an object's movements. Though admittedly I've never looked into a visual editor for HTML5, that's if one even exists.
(Of course, something has to be said about the price too. HTML5 is basically costless. Flash...let's just say I rode on my school's license back then.)
Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
#70I know this is tongue in cheek, but I was there and I hated all the really bad design. Now things are so cool I find myself clicking on plain text because it might be a link. Somewhere in between is where we need to end up.