4 ms·

Interesting experiment! In the last sample "everything was wrong" because "CSS was not invented for the next three years". Was pure html styling not an option?

Interesting experiment! In the last sample "everything was wrong" because "CSS was not invented for the next three years". Was pure html styling not an option? It's still what is done in html emails for compatibility I believe?

rob74 3y ago
My thoughts exactly! It's probably painful for a web developer from today to put the styling into the HTML files, use tables for layout, and all the other "good old" hacks, but I think he could have gotten reasonably close to the design even in an ancient browser. With a lot of effort, of course...
- ajxs 3y ago
  I think the earliest you can reproduce the layout is probably somewhere around 1997, which was when HTML4 was standardised. Earlier than that the block model was really primitive, and didn't support things like arbitrary margins and padding. Mosaic didn't even support arbitrary block elements like <div>. From 1993 to 1998 things were developing really rapidly, with the state of the art advancing so much each year. It must have been a really exciting time to be involved!
  - pavlov 3y ago
    > “It must have been a really exciting time to be involved!” It seems kind of hard to believe today, but most of the excitement in 1995-98 was around Java applets. To a lot of people it seemed that the interesting interactive stuff would be delivered in Java, and HTML was just a basic document format that was destined to become primarily an export target for tools like Frontpage or Word. Browser vendors were adding junk features like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, which didn’t improve the perception that Java is a real platform while HTML is ad hoc document glue.
    - datavirtue 3y ago
      Java and applets. I was never crazy interested in applets but Java lit a fire under me. Cross-platform drove me to Java immediately.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    In the olden days you used 1x1px transparent gifs for margins. You could also use table cell spacing and padding if you were going all out on tables. Another common hack was a fixed width table with a text-align=right attribute inside a single center tag. This gave you a fixed width content area (inside the table) that was centered in case the user's window was wider than your design's intended width. As far as an exciting time, the state of the art advancing was great but there were a lot of limitations. HTML and browsers rapidly advanced but people didn't necessarily jump on those updates. There was also a lot of divergence between the specs and implementations. Reliable layouts targeted the lowest common denominators between different browsers.
ajxs 3y ago
Unfortunately Mosaic didn't support much in the way of layout elements. The <table> element wouldn't even be added to the HTML standard until May 1996, in RFC 1942. These were the earliest days of HTML, and things were still very, very basic!
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  I remember websites from 1995. The trick was to just do everything as an image map, like the MSN bus.

rob74 3y ago

My thoughts exactly! It's probably painful for a web developer from today to put the styling into the HTML files, use tables for layout, and all the other "good old" hacks, but I think he could have gotten reasonably close to the design even in an ancient browser. With a lot of effort, of course...

ajxs 3y ago
I think the earliest you can reproduce the layout is probably somewhere around 1997, which was when HTML4 was standardised. Earlier than that the block model was really primitive, and didn't support things like arbitrary margins and padding. Mosaic didn't even support arbitrary block elements like <div>. From 1993 to 1998 things were developing really rapidly, with the state of the art advancing so much each year. It must have been a really exciting time to be involved!
- pavlov 3y ago
  > “It must have been a really exciting time to be involved!” It seems kind of hard to believe today, but most of the excitement in 1995-98 was around Java applets. To a lot of people it seemed that the interesting interactive stuff would be delivered in Java, and HTML was just a basic document format that was destined to become primarily an export target for tools like Frontpage or Word. Browser vendors were adding junk features like the <blink> and <marquee> tags, which didn’t improve the perception that Java is a real platform while HTML is ad hoc document glue.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    Java and applets. I was never crazy interested in applets but Java lit a fire under me. Cross-platform drove me to Java immediately.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  In the olden days you used 1x1px transparent gifs for margins. You could also use table cell spacing and padding if you were going all out on tables. Another common hack was a fixed width table with a text-align=right attribute inside a single center tag. This gave you a fixed width content area (inside the table) that was centered in case the user's window was wider than your design's intended width. As far as an exciting time, the state of the art advancing was great but there were a lot of limitations. HTML and browsers rapidly advanced but people didn't necessarily jump on those updates. There was also a lot of divergence between the specs and implementations. Reliable layouts targeted the lowest common denominators between different browsers.

ajxs 3y ago

Unfortunately Mosaic didn't support much in the way of layout elements. The <table> element wouldn't even be added to the HTML standard until May 1996, in RFC 1942. These were the earliest days of HTML, and things were still very, very basic!

earthboundkid 3y ago
I remember websites from 1995. The trick was to just do everything as an image map, like the MSN bus.