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HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

tedium.co

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Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#61

Post by ubermonkey »

RyanShook wrote: post #57

Why exactly was Internet Explorer so bad? In hindsight, it looks like a huge missed opportunity for Microsoft.

They were attempting to replace standards-based rendering with their idiosyncratic version. It wasn't that IE was bad; it was that it was deliberately that way b/c they saw the web as a threat to the desktop, and wanted to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish it.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#62

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

phero_cnstrcts wrote: post #30
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #27

> Remember when our browsers defaulted to gray backgrounds? That was weird, right? better than white themes we have today

The best part is going between two dark themed sites at night and get a blinding bright flash as a transition.

I used to override the default style to do white text black background and I lost count of the number of sites that would set one of those properties to the common default causing everything to be invisible.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#64

Post by vsnf »

The article and every comment in this thread thereof is a thermonuclear illustration of (part of) why I hate web development. This is what so many of my peers told me was the way to develop applications. Nevermind that the desktop frameworks, quirky though they were at times, had none of these issues and didn’t force some absolutely wild hacks on their users.

I will never not be salty about the DOM, CSS, and all the wonky apis to control them. JavaScript in comparison was the least of the sins of web dev.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#66

Post by codingdave »

sbarre wrote: post #49
kuschku wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to know a JS hack that truly "shaped the Internet", that'd be ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"). It's the origin of AJAX, allowed GMail to dynamically update the mail list, and led to the entire SPA craze. If you read ancient articles like this one https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/dynamic-page-updat... you can truly see just how much it changed the internet.

Hah I was hoping someone would bring this up.. We were using that XMLHTTP object as far back as 1999 (I just went to look at old source code) to load page fragments do quasi-SPA stuff before it was a thing.

Same - I recall using it heavily in 99. But that was just on one internal app. I admit that I didn't really predict the SPA thing until Google maps came out and really showed how far it could be taken.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#67

Post by cantSpellSober »

wiredfool wrote: post #33
keepamovin wrote: post #5

I 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…

I love how tables "went away", and were widely replaced with bootstrap. Which gives you ... tables. in divs. But only 12 columns wide.

They weren't s through, meaning they could be easily made responsive.

Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet

#70

Post by flagrant_taco »

wavemode wrote: post #65

Sometimes I can't tell if modern web developers are spoiled, by having CSS Grid and IE being dead. Or if we were spoiled back then, by not having to deal with the complexity of modern frameworks and build processes.

There is something unique in web development connotation to the other fields I've worked in. The industry has made a habit of reinventing the wheel in every more complex ways.

My best guess is that this is a side effect of web being a field that's more often picked by new or less experienced devs.

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