Have used all of them, and will use some of them even today
HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
71–80 of 233 posts
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#72I missed out on 1. because it was before my time, and I never needed 7., everything else I used at some point :D
I’m actually missing a bunch of CSS hacks for IE10+ and I think even early Edge version where MS said "No more conditional comments, we can now do everything"[0], but ended up still being buggy and incomplete and requiring special CSS to work properly.
[0]: I can kinda understand it. People had "if !IE" conditional comments, but they now supported that stuff. But they should just have changed the supported syntax, their browsers were still utter crap.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#73Using 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…
Speaking of floats being used for layout, you could probably add the clearfix hack to this list too.
That was an essential part of my CSS toolbox for years, and something that ended up being one of the first things added in every new project.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#74Sometimes 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.
Probably both, though I think it's probably easier nowadays simply because you don't technically need modern frameworks and build processes, and can create what would previously be complicated sites and apps with ease using modern CSS and JavaScript.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#75This gave me ptsd haha. Also shows how mush cost we have/had with one company (MSFT) fucking up so bad. Imagine the hours incurred because IE sucks?
ptsd.psd ?
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#76> Why it was useful: Because Internet Explorer was trash Great insight
Specifically: IE6 was trash. Microsoft had won the browser war, but at the same time the dotcom crash and antitrust action over the tight integration between IE and Windows caused Microsoft to stop investing in it.
I don't agree IE6 was trash at that time. It was much better than the competition. IE was much faster and less resource intensive than Netscape, which was a big deal when RAM was measured in megabytes. It's not fair to compare it to browsers which came out years later.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#77Using 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…
> it was all about using floats for layout for a few years
Called these "faux columns" and a basic 3-column layout was so difficult it was referred to as the "holy grail" of layouts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design)#Faux_c...
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#78Some of my favorites: - Faux columns, to get a visual stretch and make it appear that the sidebar was as long as the content https://alistapart.com/article/fauxcolumns/ - Or take that even further, with a nine-patch and 9 div's or a 3x3 table you could hack your own borders by repeating backgrounds in some axis. With CSS3 we got border-image that could help this a bit. These border styles aren't that much in favor an…
> Faux columns
Still live on our main-website because there’s never time to replace it with something more modern ;)
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#79One more to add from the early days: widespread use of , the character entity for a non-breaking space.
They were used to move text to the right to the left within a container. Or (IIRC) in table cells to make them behave, similar to 1x1 spacer gifs. Some pages had hundreds of nsps. Just kind of a general way to add margin or padding.
Re: HTML hacks that shaped the Internet
#80I 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 absolutely are not tables though.