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Did anybody notice that the 1997's Hello World example https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-again/images/notepad.gif https://frankchimero.co

by ktpsns 9y ago

Did anybody notice that the 1997's Hello World example https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-again/images/notepad.gif https://frankchimero.com/writing/everything-easy-is-hard-aga... still works? Open the most easy built-in text editor on your system (even on Android one should be able to do that, isn't it), save it, open it with your browser locally. In some aspects, the evolution of the web is similar to what the C language ecosystem experienced. It was dead simple in the beginning --- however the "Hello World" is still the same! Today's users are more demanding in terms of user interfaces and you will not go far without libraries. Same story with building modern "reactive" websites. I personally like that CSS got more powerful, it allows us to build modern websites without JavaScript. That wasn't possible 20 years ago.

pmlnr 9y ago
20 years ago was 1998. CSS was the modern thing. JS was called DHTML and was used for mouse trailing bouncing balls. XMLHttpRequest debuted natively in IE6, which was released in 2001, before that, it was ActiveX and nobody used it. You did create modern sites with CSS, without JS.
- qznc 9y ago
  The days of the CSS Zen Garden. For me, the good old times. http://www.csszengarden.com/ http://www.csszengarden.com/
  - ktpsns 9y ago
    Indeed! CSS Zen Garden was my holy grail 15 years ago.
- loopbit 9y ago
  > CSS was the modern thing. JS was called DHTML and was used for mouse trailing bouncing balls. Javascript was called Javascript and was used, mostly, for form validation. Dynamic menus, animations... - all of which you couldn't do with CSS alone - were called DHTML. You could even use Javascript in the server. > [...] before that, it was ActiveX and nobody used it. Plenty of people used ActiveX and it was useful, sometimes, although it limited you to IE. But you are forgetting two of the most widely used technologies of the time: Applets and Flash. Fortunately both are out of modern web development. > You did create modern sites with CSS, without JS. You did create sites with CSS, "modern" sites included JS and DHTML. Then, as now, I found that most people complaining about Javascript were really complaining about bad coders and bad implementations; The browser's DOM back then and the mess that is NPM today. The language itself has bad decisions (weak dynamic types) and good features (functional capabilities), exactly like every other language out there.
- davidjnelson 9y ago
  It's pretty interesting that the version of css which contains a box model (2/2.1) took 13 years to settle as a standard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets#Standardization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets#Standar... ). Also interesting is that it took 8 years for XMLHttpRequest to settle into the version ( 2 ) that supports accessing other origins ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History ) and that Internet Explorer didn't support CORS until version 10 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#Cross-domain_requests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#Cross-domain_re... ), which reached general availability in 2012 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_10#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_10#History ).
notahacker 9y ago
The Hello World works. But if you wanted to build anything more complex, it probably looked a bit more like <center><table width="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="eee" colspan="2"><img src="foo" align="right" width="200px"><font size="1">... Virtually none of which is considered valid in HTML5, and which probably doesn't render properly in some modern browsers. Mostly this was less to do with "power" and more to do with a web standards turf war about forcing layout out of markup, despite the available CSS syntax and early 00s browsers struggling a lot with basic grid layouts. We've now come full circle with a lot of modern frameworks end up working with HTML markup like <div class="center full-width" ><div class="col"><div class="gray col-2 small-text"><img class="right" style="width: 200px"> which is remarkably similar except that it involves a library, custom css and quite possibly javascript polyfills or autoprefixer tools if the framework or parts of the code is written in modern CSS, all to do what HTML4.0 and late nineties browsers did natively. (And you had CSS font and colour selection if you wanted it then anyway) That's not to say that there haven't been useful innovations like media queries and rounded corners (making them with graphics was horrible) or that a global CSS file doesn't make a lot of sense in most use cases. But there's an awful lot of wheel reinvention that's happened to vanilla layout markup.
- ktpsns 9y ago
  I second the full circle. However, to be honest, LESS/SASS allows us to use semantic class names, so we can do better. This was hip 4 years ago with Bootstrap and I guess today the young folks uses CSS3 and therefore can get rid of the intermediate compiler.

by ktpsns 9y ago

pmlnr 9y ago

20 years ago was 1998. CSS was the modern thing. JS was called DHTML and was used for mouse trailing bouncing balls. XMLHttpRequest debuted natively in IE6, which was released in 2001, before that, it was ActiveX and nobody used it. You did create modern sites with CSS, without JS.

qznc 9y ago
The days of the CSS Zen Garden. For me, the good old times. http://www.csszengarden.com/ http://www.csszengarden.com/
- ktpsns 9y ago
  Indeed! CSS Zen Garden was my holy grail 15 years ago.
loopbit 9y ago
> CSS was the modern thing. JS was called DHTML and was used for mouse trailing bouncing balls. Javascript was called Javascript and was used, mostly, for form validation. Dynamic menus, animations... - all of which you couldn't do with CSS alone - were called DHTML. You could even use Javascript in the server. > [...] before that, it was ActiveX and nobody used it. Plenty of people used ActiveX and it was useful, sometimes, although it limited you to IE. But you are forgetting two of the most widely used technologies of the time: Applets and Flash. Fortunately both are out of modern web development. > You did create modern sites with CSS, without JS. You did create sites with CSS, "modern" sites included JS and DHTML. Then, as now, I found that most people complaining about Javascript were really complaining about bad coders and bad implementations; The browser's DOM back then and the mess that is NPM today. The language itself has bad decisions (weak dynamic types) and good features (functional capabilities), exactly like every other language out there.
davidjnelson 9y ago
It's pretty interesting that the version of css which contains a box model (2/2.1) took 13 years to settle as a standard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets#Standardization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets#Standar... ). Also interesting is that it took 8 years for XMLHttpRequest to settle into the version ( 2 ) that supports accessing other origins ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History ) and that Internet Explorer didn't support CORS until version 10 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#Cross-domain_requests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#Cross-domain_re... ), which reached general availability in 2012 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_10#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_10#History ).

notahacker 9y ago

The Hello World works. But if you wanted to build anything more complex, it probably looked a bit more like <center><table width="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="eee" colspan="2"><img src="foo" align="right" width="200px"><font size="1">... Virtually none of which is considered valid in HTML5, and which probably doesn't render properly in some modern browsers. Mostly this was less to do with "power" and more to do with a web standards turf war about forcing layout out of markup, despite the available CSS syntax and early 00s browsers struggling a lot with basic grid layouts. We've now come full circle with a lot of modern frameworks end up working with HTML markup like <div class="center full-width" ><div class="col"><div class="gray col-2 small-text"><img class="right" style="width: 200px"> which is remarkably similar except that it involves a library, custom css and quite possibly javascript polyfills or autoprefixer tools if the framework or parts of the code is written in modern CSS, all to do what HTML4.0 and late nineties browsers did natively. (And you had CSS font and colour selection if you wanted it then anyway) That's not to say that there haven't been useful innovations like media queries and rounded corners (making them with graphics was horrible) or that a global CSS file doesn't make a lot of sense in most use cases. But there's an awful lot of wheel reinvention that's happened to vanilla layout markup.

ktpsns 9y ago
I second the full circle. However, to be honest, LESS/SASS allows us to use semantic class names, so we can do better. This was hip 4 years ago with Bootstrap and I guess today the young folks uses CSS3 and therefore can get rid of the intermediate compiler.