[HN Gopher] Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
___________________________________________________________________
Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)
Author : Fiveplus
Score : 354 points
Date : 2021-11-21 13:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zachholman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zachholman.com)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Who remembers when everybody was syndicating all their favorite
| RSS feeds on their own blogs, and then some joker posted a blog
| entry to his own RSS feed with a title like "What happens when
| you put an unbalanced <BLINK> tag into the title?", and the
| ENTIRE BLOGOSPHERE started blinking?
| masswerk wrote:
| The most important table construct using a spacer-gif is missing!
| <TD WIDTH="300"><IMG SRC="/spacer.gif" WIDTH="200"
| HEIGHT="1"></TD>
|
| defines a column of a minimum width of 200px and a maximum width
| of 300px. 1990s responsive design.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I call mine p.gif.
|
| I still use one today, because, in order to maintain the Any
| Browser promise, I use an XHR request for pre-XHR browsers, which
| just sets the src of the spacer gif.
|
| If any return values are needed, they're populated into the src
| attribute with a redirect. :)
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| > It had Active Desktop. It had Channels.
|
| I remember playing with Active Dekstop as a kid, but what were
| channels?
| chungy wrote:
| Basically widgets you could place on your Windows 98 desktop;
| could be used for weather, stocks, news, whatever.
|
| Probably best-known for being the default ad deployment on the
| Windows 98 desktop.
| deepsand wrote:
| Ah this brings back memories, and so do many of the anecdotes in
| this thread.
|
| I remember trying these tricks for my Pokemon site hosted on
| Angelfire. Great fun as a 10 year old, I even started making my
| own animated gifs.
|
| The page is still up, with this being the latest announcement: _I
| still need a JAVA person and desperately need more webmasters!!!
| So if you wan 't to help me e-mail_
|
| Crypto Twitter is very bullish on Web3 being the resurgence of
| this type of mentality. Fun and accessible technology that has
| the potential to mature into something powerful. I can't help but
| agree.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| I got my start cutting HTML in the late 90s. I worked for a
| development company that had partnered with various design
| agencies. The design agencies would produce the mock-ups of the
| website in Photoshop and throw them across to us at the
| development agency to turn into websites.
|
| I would get the templates, use the guides tool to mark out where
| where the slices would be for the tables then get to cutting. You
| got quite adept at being able to look at a design and figure out
| where the spacer gifs would go, where repeating background images
| would go etc. Everything was laid out using nested tables (and I
| started with Dreamweaver but at some point just stopped using the
| "split" view that it had and used it only as an IDE).
|
| Once converted to HTML templates it was then plugged into a
| custom CMS along with any additional programming that might be
| needed for it. We actually hosted a payment gateway for credit
| card payments that customers could use. Almost a prototype
| version of Stripe.
|
| The whole process was very assembly line driven:
|
| PSD Designs > HTML templates > CMS integration > Custom
| development > Deployment
| dig1 wrote:
| Don't worry, some of us still are using those tricks, especially
| nbsp and blank pixel. Why? Well, I'm doing backend/infra stuff
| most of my time, so I have no idea what is current or bleeding
| edge in frontend space these days. When someone starts screaming
| that page/app is looking broken and fronted devs are sleeping in
| different timezones, a couple of nbsp-s usually fix the problem.
| Happy customer, happy me :)
|
| Btw. isn't DHTML for "Dynamic HTML"?
| iechoz6H wrote:
| 'Btw. isn't DHTML for "Dynamic HTML"?' Yes [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
| ksec wrote:
| >Btw. isn't DHTML for "Dynamic HTML"?
|
| It is. I thought he was making a joke ( or a Jab ) with
| everything in modern dev being "distributed". May be I read him
| wrong.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I write maybe three lines of html per year...
|
| I still start writing everything in UPPERCASE.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom
| and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was
| originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something
| like:
|
| Me: _demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection,
| hosted on a free site_
|
| Owner: You wrote this?
|
| Me: Yeah.
|
| Owner: This is in Perl?
|
| Me: Yeah.
|
| So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going
| to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that
| I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he
| would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that
| weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages
| that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was
| Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those
| pages.
|
| How hard could that be?
|
| So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even
| remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages
| of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out
| of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of
| nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and
| s all over the place and I remember looking at it and
| thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck.
|
| But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the
| editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some
| things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he
| came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being
| productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good.
|
| The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was
| like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9
| an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of
| course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.
| agumonkey wrote:
| the most difficult people are the less knowledgeable it seems
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I wish interviews were like this. Show them something you built
| and you get hired instead of the nonsense of leetcode.
| monocasa wrote:
| FWIW, that's how I structure my interviews typically, so they
| still exist in some places.
|
| For anyone reading along I highly encourage that; there's way
| more signal to noise hearing about some project they worked
| on and why they were proud enough to put it on their resume
| than 'did they remember the algorithmic call/response'. You
| can't beat an almost post mortem discussion where you let the
| interviewee lead on what they think went well and what they'd
| have done differently with hindsight.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Do you find it works even if they can't actually show you
| any _code_ , because it's proprietary belong to other
| employers?
| lanstin wrote:
| Yes. If people talk enough they can't help but share all
| the relevant details if you know enough about creating
| medium or large sized systems. Also I ask questions for
| stories about troubleshooting bugs, and when to log, some
| story when logs And I would rather hire someone that
| iterates well over the weeks or months time frame than
| can solve something quickly.
|
| For newbies, it's harder.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| 100% this. All you really have to do is get people
| talking. Have them tell you a story and ask for details.
| If they have trouble when you get into details then they
| are making it up. If not you should have a fun
| conversation.
| cmg wrote:
| As a recent interviewee I can say that I'd be asked about
| code I was proud of. The last place I worked for was
| well-known enough or could be looked up easily and was
| small, so I explained what our main solution did, a
| particular issue we faced and how I planned and
| implemented a fix. Led to some good conversations with
| pseudocode, and didn't break any NDAs.
| lanstin wrote:
| Shockingly low percentage of people have built something
| they are proud to talk about. All them were good hires tho,
| as long as the explanations are detailed enough that it was
| work they actually did or adopted well enough.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Even the stuff we are proud of isn't possible to talk
| about due to NDAs.
| monocasa wrote:
| If you put a little work in, you can talk about nearly
| every project. Even stuff like classified satellites have
| been discussed; you just act respectful to the
| interviewee's boundaries (which you should be doing
| anyway).
| irrational wrote:
| I got hired on at a Fortune 500 company in the early 2000s.
| One of the reasons I've stuck around (besides the great pay
| and benefits) is that I've read all the horror stories of
| leetcode interviews. I have zero interest in participating in
| that nonsense. One benefit of this is, when I am interviewing
| people to fill development position, I never do any of that
| leetcode nonsense.
| oblio wrote:
| You should still check out to see if your pay is
| competitive for your role, level, etc.
|
| Even an awesome environment might be worth moving away from
| if your pay goes up 50-100%. Especially if you're not super
| frugal or have expenses due to other reasons.
| ldoughty wrote:
| I try to drag this out of candidates, but it's often very
| hard... Surprisingly few people actually code outside their
| jobs/education... Job code is obviously a no-go, and
| academics are usually pre-skeletoned work, So when I ask them
| to show me their favorite project, they often draw a blank...
|
| I was lucky and I did a side project my last year of college
| abusing Hadoop to make a web scraper & analysis tool on one.
| Probably got me my first 2 jobs because I LOVED to talk about
| that project, and it let me break out of my fearful and
| introverted shell to show a wider range of skills
| megablast wrote:
| It is if you've built something.
|
| Most people don't have much to show.
| lelanthran wrote:
| My story upthread is pretty much the same, except that I
| demonstrated a record-keeping application written in Turbo
| Pascal :-)
| fartcannon wrote:
| My first program (that wasn't just printing 'you suck' over
| and over in basic on the C64) was in Turbo Pascal. It used
| showed how light defracted in different materials using
| Snell's Law.
|
| It was great.
| danachow wrote:
| In fairness it isn't a great filter. As someone that had a
| similar story - I got a very well paying job out of high
| school based in part on some home grown apps 20ish years ago
| - the field of people doing small scale stuff was small and
| any basic CRUD app, let alone embedded hardware hacking made
| you instantly look like a wizard - since getting started then
| was much harder - any output was proof of a certain level of
| skill in acquiring knowledge that was above average even if
| the overall scope wasn't huge. In this day of Arduinos/RPi
| and git pull boilerplate, a small app or hardware project
| doesn't prove much of anything. The scale of side project to
| really differentiate is beyond what most people reasonably
| have time for if they wish to have a life. I think
| compensated take home assignments still have some merit
| though.
| ameen wrote:
| I'm thinking of changing jobs and the need for me to do
| leetcode and answer trivia gotcha questions vexes me. More
| than 10 years of professional experience and like 5-6 years
| of hobbyist experience as a web master for 00's websites, and
| managing ecommerce sites with >$1M's in revenue doesn't count
| for anything.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I hear you - the 90s were insane. In the space of six months I
| went from a factory worker (12 hour shifts, all night-shift, 7
| days a week) to a computer lab assistant to a entry-level
| software developer.
|
| First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl
| code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG
| (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with
| porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to
| build the CGI binaries.
|
| Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating
| around everywhere[1].
|
| [1] Well, until the bust came in late 90s :-)
| karlshea wrote:
| Oh my god you made me remember getting MRTG set up at my job
| in high school so we could get per-port graphs from a managed
| switch.
| trilinearnz wrote:
| Great story. So often these end in the person throwing up their
| hands and walking away, but I'm glad you were both able to work
| it out :)
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Well what was I going to do, go back to the factory?
|
| I was all-in.
| thelittleone wrote:
| Great story. Sure sounds like Dreamweaver. My go to back then
| was Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time (of the article):
|
| _Only 90s Web Developers Remember This_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7300429 - Feb 2014 (394
| comments)
| mattlondon wrote:
| DHTML was dynamic HTML IIRC. I don't think it has gone away, we
| just don't have a name for it now because it is standard practice
| to modify the DOM using javascript (for better or worse)
| orkj wrote:
| What about the thing that we for some reason slapped on there
| with pride? "Made with notepad". Remember those buttons/ribbons?
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Drop shadows, rounded corners, the holy grail layout, optimized
| for 800x600, 960.css, print stylesheets, flash files, the advent
| of promises...
|
| We didn't start the fire, it was always burning while the
| beachball was turning.
| cloudedcordial wrote:
| Somewhat related to the 90s web. Here's the aesthetics of the
| buttons, title bar and dropdown menu during those days.
| https://jdan.github.io/98.css/
| [deleted]
| ameen wrote:
| A lot of old 90's "hacks" are still commonplace in current email
| design. Thanks to Outlook's reliance on a brain dead MS Word-
| based rendering system rather than using actual modern HTML5.
|
| And since Outlook is still the standard for email clients in the
| workplace, all other systems are impacted as well.
|
| It's interesting to see modern day developers struggle with email
| design and turn to folks like us :D
| funstuff007 wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing. We use mjml to abstract away
| all this nonsense for us. Great library.
|
| https://mjml.io/
| djxfade wrote:
| Ironically Gmail's web based email client also renders the HTML
| bad. I guess they emulate what Outlook is doing.
| ronenlh wrote:
| It's referenced in the 1x1 gif, all website layout was made with
| tables. And the 1x1 gif allowed to set very narrow columns/rows,
| which could be made to look like borders, with images as the
| round corners.
|
| Also the ubiquitous visitor counter, uploading assets with ftp,
| cgi-bin, styling in html, animated gifs, midi soundtracks, "in
| construction" signs, random links to pages the "webmaster" liked.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| This is why the tech industry only having a memory of about five
| years makes me sad. You learn the tricks to get the job done, the
| next generation comes along and mocks you for being outdated, not
| understanding that they build on the shoulders of what came
| before them.
| fauria wrote:
| I'm missing the <marquee>:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/marqu...
|
| , the "under construction" GIFs:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...
|
| and those lightsaber horizontal content dividers.
| jraph wrote:
| And out of topic dancing dog / cat GIFs. And horrible gray
| backgrounds. Or worse, not gray backgrounds.
| arendtio wrote:
| Sometime in the 2000s I learned that using the css left
| attribute to animate marquee like text flows, worked much
| better (smoother and I think also performance wise). I was a
| bit surprised, that some handmade marquee was performing better
| than the native original.
| oakmad wrote:
| I still convert {' '} to every time I see it in the code
| base.
|
| A lot of fond memories from the 90s bubble. I love me some
| coldfusion and ftp and occasionally think how easier it was in
| some ways.
|
| I also like to say theres not a unicorn today I couldn't have
| founded if I'd had the idea or insight at the time - plus
| motivation, money etc. Hindsight and all that.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Was just thinking the other day I miss the title "webmaster,"
| made one feel important. ;-)
| tarkin2 wrote:
| This makes me feel old. But also glad. I'm glad I experienced web
| dev before the current pile of abstractions, painful convenience
| tools and frameworks were lumped upon us. It was fun back then.
| Now it's a pain.
| ksec wrote:
| My memory is hazy, I was reading and thinking surely some of
| these ( DHTML ) are crossing into early 00s? And then I read
|
| > In other words, which editor (FrontPage '98, obviously), which
| web server (GeoCities, you moron),
|
| Oh yes. FrontPage 98!
|
| > I miss the good ol' days. " _Today we have abstractions on top
| of abstractions on top of JavaScript_ ", of all things. Shit
| doesn't even know how to calculate math correctly. It's amazing
| we ever got to where we are today, when you think about it.
|
| Couldn't agree more. And not just on the Web, it is abstraction
| on top of abstraction in everything, from Tech to everything in
| general.
| robbyking wrote:
| My team was ride or die with (pre-Macromedia) HomeSite!
|
| Oh God and MS Visual Source Safe.
| fault1 wrote:
| I loved Adobe Pagemill myself.
|
| I remember when Aldus and Macromind merged.
|
| I can't believe Adobe was allowed to merge with Macromedia.
| d23 wrote:
| Wow, dynamic drive. I thought that was like the coolest site on
| the planet when I was a kid.
| davismwfl wrote:
| Definitely was interesting, and fun times for sure.
|
| Microsoft with ASP, ActiveX and VBScript in pages. I also
| remember writing ISAPI extensions for IIS to handle searching
| backend systems. IIRC e-bay was the best known company that had
| an ISAPI extension at one point. I worked at a smaller company
| where we did it cause our systems were disconnected and we had to
| search custom databases.
|
| Macromedia with dreamweaver & Flash & shockwave at one point
| (think that was a little later).
|
| Java applets, ugh.
|
| Splash pages, visitor counters.
|
| ODBC, ADO, OLE DB... Connecting to databases was always about
| finding the right driver for your OS and DB version which
| depending on OS & DB could be a challenge.
|
| Browser targeting was a major pain, splash/home pages telling you
| to only use IE or Netscape etc.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Because I saw an example of it in the post, what's the right way
| to handle special characters in script tags? Browsers seem to let
| you do anything, but stray ampersands are sort of illegal?
| jraph wrote:
| If you write HTML, only </script> will end the Javascript
| parsing and make the parser go back to parsing HTML. This is
| the only thing you need to escape if it appears in the
| Javascript code (by using something like '<' + '/script>' for
| instance). You CANNOT escape special HTML characters (&, <, >)
| because the parser is interpreting Javascript code, not HTML
| (but still looking for </script>).
|
| If you write XHTML, special HTML (XML) characters in <script>
| MUST be escaped. You can avoid having to escape manually by
| putting your Javascript between <![CDATA[ and ]]>. That's
| because the XML parser does not have special handling of script
| tags, contrary to HTML, and will not forgive any unescaped
| special character. It will parse them as tags and entities if
| they happen to be syntactically valid XML tags or entities.
|
| If you write polyglot HTML / XHTML, CDATA sections will not
| handled as such by the HTML parser and will break your
| javascript because <![CDATA[ will be parsed as Javascript, and
| that does not work. But you can put them in javascript
| comments, like this: <script> //
| <![CDATA[ let your_code = "be here"; // ]]>
| </script>
|
| (you will also need to "escape" both "</script>" and "]]>" if
| they ever appear in the Javascript code).
|
| In XHTML mode, the Javascript will look like this after
| parsing: // let your_code = "be here";
| //
|
| (because CDATA are interpreted in XML, and "replaced" by their
| content)
|
| In HTML mode: // <![CDATA[ let
| your_code = "be here"; // ]]>
|
| (because CDATA sections are not recognized, so they will be
| handled as normal commented javascript code)
| aledalgrande wrote:
| haha this reminds me of when I started to see HTML in high
| school, fun times
| Giorgi wrote:
| who remembers 88x36 button banners? You could approach any
| webmaster in your niche and exchange such banners. Fun times.
| imperio59 wrote:
| He forgot to mention hiding sensitive information behind a JS-
| powered script that had the password saved in the clear in the
| script on the page, and then disabling right-click events so you
| couldn't inspect the source of the page to find the super secret
| password...
|
| Hint: it was totally unsafe then, it still is now.
| progre wrote:
| I, as an embedded developer working for a vending machine
| manufacturer did this about 10 years ago.
|
| The sales people came running and asked me to help them "fix
| the home page" because the sales chief had realised that
| diffrent markets could see what prices the other markets was
| being charged.
|
| Not being a web guy, I said that we probably should have a look
| at the server code to see if we could figure out what to do.
|
| Turns out there was no server code, just static web pages. I
| said we could probably password protect the price lists with
| javascript but any child who knew how to hit F12 would be able
| to see the prices anyway.
|
| They said "What's F12? Can you do it today?"
| rvieira wrote:
| Missing in that list: the amusing Javascript right-click
| disabling.
| rbinv wrote:
| Fighting "right-clicker mentality" before NFTs were even a
| thing!
| Aulig wrote:
| Some pages still do that - luckily I have this add-on nowadays:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-enable-rig...
|
| Very satisfying when you can bypass such useless "protections"
| unilynx wrote:
| Usually those right click protections just popped up an alert
| on mouse down, so you could skip them by keeping RMB down as
| you left click them away.. after which the context menu would
| appear anyway.
| ornornor wrote:
| You could also use the "context menu" key that many
| keyboards had next to the windows key. Because it wasn't a
| mouse click, you'd get the right click menu open that way.
| dmje wrote:
| Wow. 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 finding yourself
| unable to steal an image because it's not just an image you can
| right click on any more.
|
| Golden times.
| montag wrote:
| Source maps could be a saving grace here, if only more sites
| would ship them in production.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > finding yourself unable to steal an image
|
| There's browser extensions that will convert a whole page as it
| is loaded in the browser to an image file. For ever-scrolling
| pages you have to manually stop it.
| skytreader wrote:
| > 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 <table
| border="0"></table> 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. :)
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| I was always jealous of schools that would teach some sort of
| programming or web design. My high school computer class
| (each year) was learning how to use MS Office. Which was
| probably the most useful instruction the rest of those kids
| could have received... but I wanted to learn to program.
|
| So, the computer class instructor sat me down and asked me
| what I knew about programming. "I can use Perl", I said (I
| had read _Perl For Dummies, v5.00502 edition_ ). So he told
| me to make an online calendar for the school. So, I did. No
| instruction... just figured it out as I went. And that's how
| I learned that managing and displaying events in arbitrary
| times and dates is harder than _P=NP_.
|
| Turns out that giving me that project was intended to save
| the school from having to pay for a real online calendar.
| biofox wrote:
| I used to build entire sites in photoshop. It produced
| horrendous mark-up, but streamlined the whole design process,
| and allowed for really beautiful graphic designs. Haven't done
| web development in well over a decade, but I assume from your
| comment this is no longer a thing?
| riedel wrote:
| Thanks to this post and internet archive's wayback machine I
| just had a trip back to the end of the 90s to some of the web
| pages I wrote these days for a local PR agency. I was surprised
| to see that they still render reasonably well on my smart
| phone. Nice dose of nostalgia
| fault1 wrote:
| Don't forget rabid useragent sniffing to send browsers the "good
| pages": http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
|
| this probably started in 1997-or 1998 or so, and probably had its
| apex in the mid 2000s especially with the hegemony of IE5.
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| And now today CloudFlare serves you a captcha if they don't
| like your user-agent and IP address combo.
| EGreg wrote:
| This was a typo, I am sure
|
| _DHTML, which stands for "distributed HTML", was the final
| feather in our cap of web development tools._
|
| Nice that in 2021 we are thinking so much about decentralized
| systems though :)
|
| "Dynamic" btw
| cmg wrote:
| I'll always have a fond memory of window.status, which still
| exists but doesn't do anything on the majority of browsers
| anymore as they don't have status bars to modify the text of.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/stat...
| throwanem wrote:
| I hadn't thought about status bar marquee scripts in a hot
| minute! Thanks for that.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| A casualty of the forced segregation to 16:9 monitors early in
| the century.
| jrs235 wrote:
| Small nitpick, DHTML is Dynamic HTML, not Distributed HTML.
| jphalimi wrote:
| Memories! :-) I was a web developer in the 2000s and I can relate
| to all of these very accurately... Replace Frontpage 98 by
| Frontpage 2003 and there you go!
| black_13 wrote:
| What offices with doors?
| omgmajk wrote:
| Oof, the PTSD is real.
| marioletto wrote:
| 1999: https://www.atomicsky.com/
| rbobby wrote:
| > spacer.gif
|
| Guilty
|
| >
|
| Guilty (habitual offender)
| Soulsbane wrote:
| I remember using spacer.gif a lot back then.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Forgot page counters.
|
| /cgi-bin
|
| ColdFusion
|
| Absence of alpha-channel on gifs so having to match the
| background color.
|
| But yes, it was the wild-wild-west of security holes out there!
| The amount of genius it takes to create a new web exploit these
| days is astonishingly high compared to 1994.
| lozenge wrote:
| I made a one-page website for my neighbour's band and we set
| the counter to 174 so that it would look like people had
| visited. He called me as soon as I got home excited that the
| counter had gone up. Yeah, it does that when you look at it...
| listless wrote:
| Holman was one of the first authors that did humor and tech
| together (at least that I can remember) and he completely changed
| what I thought a good tech article should be. He was/is a great
| engineer, but he's an even better communicator.
| [deleted]
| samwillis wrote:
| They 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 cgi proxy has been updated as recently at 2019! [1]
|
| 0:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980709151514/http://scriptarch...
|
| 1: https://jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
| comprev wrote:
| CGI Proxy takes me back for exactly the reason you describe -
| bypassing filters on the school network :-)
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > Matts Script Archive
|
| Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to
| create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game,
| right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded
| UltimateBB.
| mikeryan wrote:
| I started my true web development arc in 1999 and used most of
| these techniques. There was a netizen of the time called "Dr
| Ozone" who was doing mind bending stuff on his site at the time.
| It's still around at https://ozones.com/ it's where I learned
| what JavaScript could do. The number of hacks used to deal with
| the DOM models until jquery was epic.
| fault1 wrote:
| I remember that site.
|
| everything I learned about javascript, I learned from gamelan:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19961022194345/http://www.gamela...
|
| It's funny how many neural network demos there are. I almost
| forgot that was one of the prior "AI" waves before the previous
| AI crash.
| otterley wrote:
| Flagging for clickbait title.
| matsemann wrote:
| Other stuff I did was frames, because I didn't know how to do
| stuff on a server. So one frame for the menu and one for the
| header, things that should be equal on all pages.
|
| Using lots of b-tags to create rounded borders. Or lots of
| images.
|
| Faux columns to make it seem like different parts of the layout
| had the same size.
|
| The golden layout or what it was called. Maybe a bit later than
| the 90s, when tables weren't as hip to use anymore.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I came in at "golden layout" and I still don't understand what
| was golden about it.
| debaserab2 wrote:
| has made a big comeback in the era of jsx, which truncates
| white space around elements and interpolated expressions. I
| prefer it over an interpolated blank space {" "} since it seems a
| little easier to read.
| tdrdt wrote:
| Don't forget slicing images for dropshadows and rounded corners.
|
| And the real pros used dithered transparend gifs.
| bdcravens wrote:
| - rounded corners with images
|
| - searching for random Perl scripts to FTP into your cgi-bin
| folder
| ctippett wrote:
| Not just using images for rounded corners, but drop-shadow
| effects too. Of course, that required 8 or so different gifs to
| cover all four sides of a container, including separate images
| for the corners.
| brazzy wrote:
| Ah, yes. I remember when PHP was still called PHP3, and that was
| also the file type suffix.
| hbarka wrote:
| I love this. All the talk of low-code-no-code now have never
| heard of FrontPage 98.
| jraph wrote:
| > I miss the good ol' days. Today we have abstractions on top of
| abstractions on top of JavaScript, of all things
|
| It seems I learnt HTML just between these two eras. After the
| , 1px spacers and tables, and before the piles of
| abstractions.
|
| People cared about doing well formed XHTML and having those W3C
| Valid XHTML badges, and also those "install Firefox" buttons.
|
| This was short so today everything looks ugly to me, old and new,
| in different ways.
|
| I still use (polyglot) XHTML5 (HTML5 if I don't control
| everything being input) and avoid frontend frameworks and web
| fonts when I get to decide. This is a world where implementing a
| search bar for people who haven't discovered CTRL+F yet takes 30
| lines of dumb Javascript and filters 200 items in 1 second on a
| slow computer without any caching trick and that does not require
| minifiers and bundlers. Which does not actually sound impressive,
| or shouldn't anyway. A world where when you disable Javascript,
| the page is still perfectly readable. A world where a silly
| mistake in the HTML markup is noticed.
|
| To build an actual web application where it does not makes much
| sense to have the content as a web page, I started liking Svelte
| but I'll still at least consider doing things by manipulating the
| DOM directly before deciding.
| beardyw wrote:
| I 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.
| huntermeyer wrote:
| No mention of the page-view counter?
|
| Remember those, we'd put the message "just a counter, don't
| click" beneath them.
| saganus wrote:
| And web-rings!
| fault1 wrote:
| also banner ads:
|
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history
| sparker72678 wrote:
| It's actually in the source in one of the examples! :)
|
| > <IMG SRC="/cgi/webcounter.cgi">
| richardfey wrote:
| I still remember a DHTML folder tree view, it was quite popular.
| ldb wrote:
| A great example page http://vcfmw.org/
| nunez wrote:
| I miss when about: pages were useful and universal. Nowadays
| every browser has their own internal scheme and have dropped
| about:
| richardw wrote:
| Notepad, alt-tab, F5. Perl that produced JS that posted back to
| the Perl app. Java applets. C++ ISAPI filters on MS side and a
| single Sun server for ~3000 client sites. Duke Nukem or Quake
| until 10pm after work. What a special time.
| vgeek wrote:
| The fun of DHTML menus and your Homestead website, complete with
| neon green hit counter and guest book.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| _> Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of
| JavaScript, of all things._
|
| from one 90's web developer to another:
|
| https://htmx.org
|
| <blink>hypermedia 4eva</blink>
| asddubs wrote:
| the most nostalgic thing for me was the html comment within the
| style tag
| gscott wrote:
| ImageMaps to make a single image have clickable hotspots... did
| lots of those. You didn't have to worry about cellphones so you
| could have a 800px wide menu that's an image with hotspots,
| looked great.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| The author forgot making rounded corners using images! I kind of
| miss the creativity of old web development, especially before
| responsive web design. There was so much more variation and most
| sites didn't look like the default bootstrap template. But there
| were a lot of bad things about this era, particularly non
| standard browsers
| mattl wrote:
| I remember a great trick from Technorati where you'd load one
| image of a circle with CSS background and reposition it four
| times with <b> tags. It was a work of art.
| telesilla wrote:
| >rounded corners using images
|
| My brain is not happy to have this memory dragged out of cold
| storage!
|
| Like others here, I got my start answering an ad for someone
| who knew HTML forms, which I taught myself the day before the
| interview. Then quit my university job of menial labour and
| haven't looked back. Incredible times.
| ModernMech wrote:
| This doesn't even get into the really good stuff like webrings.
| In the days before Google and SEO, you needed to be part of some
| "webring" of related sites if you wanted someone to find your
| page.
| wonnage wrote:
| We need to figure out some sort of fireball-trail equivalent for
| touchscreens. Hope Apple/Samsung invest billions into detecting a
| hovering finger so we can finally have this!
| noyesno wrote:
| I would add: - messing with the mouse pointer
| (and adding animated graphics following it), - changing
| the whole browser's window's "chrome" to custom graphics (as in:
| custom minimize/maximize/close buttons and the edge graphics of
| the floating window) - Maybe throwing full-screen to
| maximize the impact.
| [deleted]
| andrew311 wrote:
| A memory seared into my brain from the 90s:
|
| I was in the highschool computer lab, working on a website for
| the school IT administrator. She wanted me to include a patterned
| background, blinking marquees, GIFs, the whole nine yards.
| Another student was working on the project with me, sitting next
| to me. We were both facing the window, away from the door. The
| admin left the room. I told my fellow student these choices were
| extremely tacky, and I questioned the life choices that led her
| to the point of thinking this looked good.
|
| Turns out she came back into the room and was behind me the whole
| time. Boy, did I feel like a jerk. I apologized.
|
| What a different time that was.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As a prolific user of nbsp; for aligning/indentation/spacing, I
| feel like millions of man years could have been saved by just
| deeming that acceptable than by trying to find the right voodoo
| mix of padding/margin/box-model yada yada that we ended up with.
| tlackemann wrote:
| Less we forget about <FRAME>
|
| What an amazing time. Felt like the wild west back then.
| samwillis wrote:
| The second "website" I built was a GTA fan site in about
| 1998-99 (I was about 13), I had just discovered frames and
| decided they were brilliant. The layout was a header, left side
| nav, main content and footer - all frames. But the look I was
| going for had a black ~4px border around each frame. Rather
| than do this with tables inside the frames I created a
| 'black.html' page with a back background and added it I think
| about 10 times to the frameset to create the borders. It's was
| in my mind at the time beautiful.
|
| It's archived on archive.org - I forget the url....
| tpmx wrote:
| Made me remember the International I hate Frames Club:
|
| http://budugllydesign.com/frame9806/hateframe.html
| dylan604 wrote:
| I was so happy to no longer need frames. Modern CSS with grid
| and flex have made <frame> feel like a horrible nightmare that
| I just can't quite shake. One that makes you turn on the lights
| in every room.
| wayvey wrote:
| Still feels like the wild west, just in a different way
| JasonFruit wrote:
| My contrarian take for the day: I liked frames. It was a nice
| built-in way to provide consistent site-level navigation and
| context when your styling options were otherwise pretty
| limited. The only problem was when it broke navigation outside
| the site, which was a pretty bad design decision and took a lot
| of self-discipline to prevent.
| marcodiego wrote:
| One thing a miss: a simple, easy to use, wysiwyg html editor.
| Also, these days it also would have to be open source. So, my
| only options look like bluegriffon, whose license/monetization I
| don't like, or Mozilla Composer (actually seamonkey), which seems
| basically abandoned in terms of features and maintenance seem to
| only make it compile and run on modern system.
|
| Some people may suggest a CMS, but I don't want a CMS. I just
| want a simple way to create a personal page. What alternative
| still remains?
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| The problem with wysiwyg is that I think CSS makes it hard to
| make these things.
|
| Those editors always seemed to make the kludgiest CSS because
| the CSS 'cascade' makes it hard to create drag and drop
| components.
|
| Any one more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm wrong.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Something like Hugo, I guess, though it's not WYSIWYG. But I
| don't think a WYSIWYG editor would cope with today's websites
| too well.
|
| Back in the day everyone viewed your website on a desktop
| computer, in something around 1024x768 resolution, and if you
| designed for that then you were fine for most readers. Now,
| most people will be viewing it on a mobile device, with twice
| the resolution than it actually appears, and a huge range of
| possible aspect ratios. There's no WYSIWYG tool that can handle
| this easily.
|
| Fortunately, there are lots of really simple ways to host your
| personal page now. From Github/lab pages, to Cloudflare pages,
| to AWS S3 buckets, there's a huge range of hosting options.
|
| I've used Hugo via Gitlab pages, and it worked really well.
| Especially because free (as in beer).
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| 1x1 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.
| tobr wrote:
| > 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
| nunez wrote:
| I believe that tracking pixels (1x1) are still very popular for
| mining browsing activity
| fault1 wrote:
| Yes. Facebook literally calls it the Facebook Pixel for this
| reason.
| robbyking wrote:
| I recently came across an image I wasn't able to download using
| dev tools and was shocked. I wish I had had the time to figure
| it out.
| Frost1x wrote:
| If it's visible, it's capturable, it's simply a matter of how
| obfuscated it is and how much effort you want to spend
| capturing it. In highly dynamic web apps these days, it could
| be simple as a right click or as complex as figuring out
| their rendering system, source data stream, generated key
| handshake to verify it's the script accessing the data and
| not a person, and so on. I see this sort of trash a lot more
| than I care to.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, you can just PrntScrn it as a last resort, if it's
| not a background image :-)
| gear54rus wrote:
| Link the page please?:)
| ModernMech wrote:
| Some sites that are more savvy now prevent you from getting
| into dev tools altogether. That and Google looking to make the
| whole web canvas is a disturbing trend.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Completely off the point, but how many other 90s developers feel
| like failures for not being millionaires or billionaires by now?
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I clicked in hoping to see some tacky background tiles.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Between flash and html5, there was a brief moment where DHTML
| games looked viable. I remember building something like a space
| invaders clone. Literally repositioning DOM divs each setInterval
| tick. There were a few full fledged experiments out there. The
| beauty is since its just DOM, they are playable forever if still
| hosted ;)
| masswerk wrote:
| You mean, something like
| https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze.html ? :-)
| dylan604 wrote:
| What could you do in Flash that cannot be done now in JS/CSS?
|
| I don't understand this love for Flash that won't die. Yes, it
| did something usable well before JS/CSS caught up, but we're
| there now and well past what Flash brought us. Mainly, now
| things freakin searchable, and you no longer have to live in
| fear of what the next major vuln exposed by Flash would do to
| you.
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >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
| cannot be done in modern JS/CSS today?
| skytreader wrote:
| 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.)
| avereveard wrote:
| > To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements.
|
| I'm confused, even considering this is a <2014> article, so
| before the flexbox alignment goodies, one always was a vertical-
| align and a forced display table from aligning stuff vertically.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I find it insane how much work I still have to do to figure out
| positioning on a web page (I don't do much design these days).
|
| Maybe tables weren't the best, but they were easy and
| predictable.
| Fred27 wrote:
| A 90s page isn't a 90s page without an animated gif of man
| digging a hole with "under construction".
| endemic wrote:
| Obligatory: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
| RedShift1 wrote:
| > 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?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| In a word: print designers.
|
| Traditional print designers started doing web design without
| investing the time to understand the important differences in
| the (new) paradigm.
|
| Sadly, that root problem too often persists to today.
| fault1 wrote:
| Agreed. I mean, the whole web page thing is literally a
| metaphor for people shuffling pages on their office desk.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| Most sites invert that effect: hovering reveals the underline.
| The link is still distinguishable by color, still apparently
| interactive by hover effect, and preserves underlining as a
| styling option in the text, which is preferable.
| soperj wrote:
| I suppose you leave all your links blue as well?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Only if I haven't followed them yet.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| No, they had an appropriate color, different from normal
| text.
| ssharp wrote:
| Because you could?
|
| Or pick a 90's trope: Ironic detachment? Only things that are
| obscure are cool?
| gjvnq wrote:
| I think that's because the underline makes the text hard to
| read especially in badly designed fonts.
| tyingq wrote:
| Probably the same reason we started to like flat buttons?
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Wait, some people actually like flat buttons?
| silisili wrote:
| Sarcastic or not, I really, really hate flat buttons. This
| is one area where I feel skeumorphic design works. Make it
| apparent I can push it. Today everything looks like a
| label, and good luck figuring out if it's active or not.
| webmobdev wrote:
| That and the different colour for "visited" links. This site is
| a good example where a different colour for a link you've
| clicked would be really useful - but it's strangely lacking.
| Every time I click a link on HN to read an article, and come
| back to HN to read the comments discussing said article, I have
| to scan the whole HN page again to find the link. It's
| frustrating.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| For me, followed links on HN are a lighter grey.
| robbyking wrote:
| I loved when I figured out I could get rid of the underline and
| add a dashed or dotted bottom border instead, it looked so
| cutting edge at the time.
| le-mark wrote:
| For everyone curious about DHTML, IE5 plus had this "dhtml
| behaviors" stuff that let one implement reusable components of
| markup and js. It was actually pretty cool at the time. I worked
| on a project upgrading an IE7 spa in 2016, from behaviors to
| angular.
| LaputanMachine wrote:
| This post reminded me of the "88x31 GIF Collection" post from a
| few months ago [1].
|
| Weird to think about how much the Internet has changed. Makes me
| wonder how people will look back on today's Internet.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624
| macintux wrote:
| My contributions to the nostalgia parade:
|
| - http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html
|
| - http://blooberry.com/indexdot/css/index.html
|
| - https://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/www/cgic.html
|
| And I haven't really done any web programming since cgic days,
| thankfully.
| tompazourek wrote:
| And websites made with Macromedia Flash...
| robbyking wrote:
| The comments on this page are very clearly divided between people
| who at the time were professional web developers and people who
| were teen code explorers, and I love them both.
|
| I never thought I'd feel nostalgic for that time in my life.
| notapenny wrote:
| I was an explorer at that time. I made documentation websites
| for my own fantasy novel and took screenshots of SNES emulators
| that I'd turn into table-based websites. Nostalgia indeed.
|
| Took me a career in corporate finance to realise I should
| probably go back to playing with computers again, love every
| minute of it.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I expected the part about buttons to talk about mouseovers. That
| was wizardry back in the day, making 3D-shaded buttons that
| animated as when the cursor was over them, and then changing
| color or something when you clicked. Impressed the hell out of
| people.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I gave crazy demos of embedded graphical links with cut-out
| pop-up targets and pie menus to Bill Joy and Steve Jobs in
| October 1988. They each had very different reactions!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109221
|
| DonHopkins on May 19, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...
|
| >Here's a demo of HyperTIES with pop-out embedded menus:
|
| >HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing: Demo of NeWS based HyperTIES
| authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland
| Human Computer Interaction Lab.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM
|
| >A funny story about the demo that has the photo of the three
| Sun founders whose heads puff up when you point at them:
|
| >When you point at a head, it would swell up, and you pressed
| the button, it would shrink back down again until you released
| the button again.
|
| >HyperTIES had a feature that you could click or press and hold
| on the page background, and it would blink or highlight ALL of
| the links on the page, either by inverting the brightness of
| text buttons, or by popping up all the cookie-cut-out picture
| targets (we called them "embedded menus") at the same time,
| which could be quite dramatic with the three Sun founders!
|
| >Kind of like what they call "Big Head Mode" these days!
| https://www.giantbomb.com/big-head-mode/3015-403/
|
| >I had a Sun workstation set up on the show floor at Educom in
| October 1988, and I was giving a rotating demo of NeWS, pie
| menus, Emacs, and HyperTIES to anyone who happened to walk by.
| (That was when Steve Jobs came by, saw the demo, and jumped up
| and down shouting "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat.
| That sucks!")
|
| >The best part of the demo was when I demonstrated popping up
| all the heads of the Sun founders at once, by holding the
| optical mouse up to my mouth, and blowing and sucking into the
| mouse while secretly pressing and releasing the button, so it
| looked like I was inflating their heads!
|
| >One other weird guy hung around through a couple demos, and by
| the time I got back around to the Emacs demo, he finally said
| "Hey, I used to use Emacs on ITS!" I said "Wow cool! So did I!
| What's was your user name?" and he said "WNJ".
|
| >It turns out that I had been giving an Emacs demo to Bill Joy
| all that time, then popping his head up and down by blowing and
| sucking into a Sun optical mouse, without even recognizing him,
| because he had shaved his beard!
|
| >He really blindsided me with that comment about using Emacs,
| because I always thought he was more if a vi guy. ;)
|
| Here's a paper about HyperTIES and its embedded text and
| graphical menus, pie menus, and emacs authoring tool, that we
| made in the late 80's at the University of Maryland Human
| Computer Interaction Lab:
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...
|
| Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun
| Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg
|
| HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| The awesome thing about that period was how we learned. You'd be
| on a web page, see something funky (positioning, rounded corners,
| etc) and be like "how the heck did they do that?".
|
| Then you do the ol' "View Source" and now that technique is in
| your toolkit. In fact you'd prob head right over to your
| geocities site and try it out right away.
| theK wrote:
| Yeah this was awesome time and it did teach you more than just
| the trick, navigating unknown codebases, extracting the
| meaningful parts of a non trivial piece in f code...
|
| I really think the web community lost something with the
| transition to compiled uglified js and css.... Sure google will
| show you to some code if you manage to put what you are looking
| for into words but that isn't always easy. Pitty that there is
| no standardised solution to publish the source along with the
| Minimized script nowadays.
| nunez wrote:
| This is the thing I miss the most. View-Source was the source
| of truth. No JavaScript filling in empty <div>s bullshit, No
| minifying, no uglifying.
| dehrmann wrote:
| With developer tools, this has only gotten easier.
| jspash wrote:
| Except now it just shows
|
| <html> <script src="obfuscated.javscript-
| pack.chunk-12384123.chunkittychunk-packweb.der.huhwhat?{this?
| :this-v3.2123-notcompatiblewithv3.2122}.js"> <div id="modern-
| web-app-goez-here"></div> </html>
|
| Good luck with that!
| ornornor wrote:
| I've struggled for ever with modern pages to find out what
| even listeners are attached to particular html elements. Is
| that even possible to find out? Say you're on a webpage,
| and when you click a button a bunch of JS happens. Except
| it's all minifies uglified. But the browser must know what
| JS will run when clicking that button. How do I make it
| show me what that code/function is without trawling through
| the JS code and hunting for a CSS selector or ID?
| jraph wrote:
| At least Firefox makes it easy to show which listeners
| are on which elements in the Web Developers tools. <old
| schmuck>The thing that looks like Firebug anyway.</old
| schmuck>
|
| That you'll be able to actually read the code is another
| completely different story.
| davidsojevic wrote:
| In Chrome you can get the event listeners for a given
| element by selecting/highlighting it in the Elements tab,
| then jumping across to the Console tab, you use:
| getEventListeners($0)
|
| getEventListeners is a Chrome console/devtools only
| function and $0 is a console placeholder variable for the
| currently selected element.
|
| It's definitely not the nicest way to find things and you
| often end up running into the minified/uglified madness
| when delving deeper, but sometimes it helps do the trick.
| vntok wrote:
| What developer tools doesn't show you the generated html?
| Are you using a major web browser?
| Oddskar wrote:
| Just seeing the generated HTML is trying to figure out
| the blueprint of the building by looking at the facade.
|
| Sure there's source map files, but most of the time
| you'll fine those aren't distributed together with the
| minified bundles.
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| AKA the web was always a bunch of cargo cult, NIH about the
| most basic computer programming tasks, etc.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I can't believe I'm the first one to post https://html5zombo.com
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Wow!
|
| Thanks to pixel fonts, I was able to build a multi-million dollar
| project for Pocket PC Devices during the early 2000s. It has the
| clearest typography at that distance from the eye level, and the
| availability of the stylus made it possible to get 8-pt clear
| text. The project made a lot of physicians/clinics very happy and
| I got a lot of Thank You's for a very long time after its
| release.
|
| Image Splicing. I remember building a developer tool, something
| of a 9-piece-splicer tool in Flash. It takes in an image, and
| spice the edges so you can have a liquid/elastic box with the
| desired border - sharp or rounded edges - use it with tables or
| DIVs.
| davidbarker wrote:
| That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML"
| -- I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".
| thought_alarm wrote:
| DHTML means using Javascript to animate multiple LAYER tags
| inside of Netscape Communicator 4. The "D" stands for "Daft".
| tclancy wrote:
| Good old document.layers vs document.all. And don't nest your
| tables more than seven levels deep or Netscape will explode.
| roosgit wrote:
| In 2021 it would be "decentralized HTML".
| benbristow wrote:
| HTML NFT's
| chrisco255 wrote:
| HTML based NFTs are a thing. You can reference arbitrary
| HTML & JS from the 'animation_url' in the NFT's metadata
| and produce interactive NFTs.
|
| ArcadeNFT is an example of a project that utilizes this: ht
| tps://opensea.io/assets/0xa0c38108bbb0f5f2fb46a2019d7314cc.
| ..
| Jensson wrote:
| NFTML. Non Fungible Token Markup Language. Also has the
| advantage of sounding like AI/ML tech.
| jrumbut wrote:
| You're very rich now, somehow.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Am I the only one who found the term DHTML to be one of the
| most useless initialisms that came from web development?
|
| I remember seeing "DHTML" still being thrown around as late as
| 2005, but knowing that I could refer to the components of a
| webpage as "DHTML" never seemed to have any sort of utility. I
| never cared that I could refer to the markup as being
| _dynamic_. Big deal. What _scripts_ and _applets_ could I add
| to make things move?
|
| Of course now we're _still_ stuck with this "HTML5" canard
| that won't die because nontechnical people seem to believe it's
| more advanced than "HTML".
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It's like "SpaceHTML". In space, they just call it "HTML".
| outsidetheparty wrote:
| And HTML begat DHTML and DHTML begat XHTML and in woe and
| SOAP calls HTML5 was born
| supermatt wrote:
| Yeah, it is dynamic. But the author also mentioned putting
| spacer gifs in semantically appropriate containers, so I think
| it may have been a joke?
| thayne wrote:
| Yes the whole thing is a joke, and is sarcastic. At least,
| that's the impression I got.
| robbyking wrote:
| I worked at homeshark.com (later rebranded iown.com) in the
| 90's, and we absolutely did the spacer gif trick to size our
| tables.
| supermatt wrote:
| Oh yeah, i think every one did - but they certainly werent
| used in "semantically correct containers".
| kuschku wrote:
| Even HN, this very website, still uses spacer gifs.
| Sadly.
| Calavar wrote:
| I think it is a joke.
|
| Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine
| <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and
| only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>.
|
| I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe
| a little too subtle.
| zerr wrote:
| They have mistaken it with DCOM I believe.
| WrathOfJay wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing
| WrathOfJay wrote:
| Maybe they were confusing it with DCOM (distributed COM) which
| was often talked about around that time.
| sircastor wrote:
| I came over to post this. I've never heard "distributed HTML".
| And I'm not even sure what the distributed part would be.
| cmaggiulli wrote:
| As a backend developer - I literally still use when I'm
| forced to touch something on the front end
| saganus wrote:
| I thought DHTML stood for "dynamic html", not "distributed html"?
| sumnole wrote:
| You thought correctly. The D is for dynamic, not distributed.
| jawngee wrote:
| It was x.gif, 1x1.gif was a waste of two bytes which was
| considerable savings on those insane table layouts.
| adventured wrote:
| It was t.gif, for transparent.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| And it had to be transparent, because that was the only way
| you wouldn't see it when you added it to a table cell so the
| background color would show up.
| robbyking wrote:
| Ours was called 0.gif
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| Clever - then you don't need to waste a whole byte for an
| ascii character!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I still use the 1-pixel (8-bit PNG), in my native swift client
| development. It's a cheap way to reserve a space for
| programmatically-set images.
| easton_s wrote:
| Placing table tags beside or below parent tags rendered
| differently.
| butz wrote:
| You just described building blocks of modern newsletter. In 2021
| Outlook is still a thing and renders newsletters using outdated
| Word HTML engine.
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(page generated 2021-11-21 23:00 UTC)