16 ms·

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This (2014)

• perilunar 3y ago
  The best thing about the 90s web was VRML. A pity it never really took off.
• hhsectech 3y ago
  Man, I started building sites in the mid to late 90s as a kid, for shits and giggles, then it became trendy to hire a "whizz kid" and people paid me to build garbage...web design business was so easy back then..."Your Dad says you know how to build websites? If I give you £500 will you build me one?"...hell yeah I will, we can have a big fucking banner, some scrolling marquees..."sure kid, whatever just make it look good"...no meetings, no wireframes, no bug trackers just here is £500 build me a site kid...by the way I'm a plumber. Here is my brochure...make it look like that. Then your work began. First stop, looking for gifs of spinning spanners, cartoon dudes with hard hats on. Then you'd get the domain and hosting, put an "under construction" page up...man good times. I wish I could just "build a website" today...but you can't...you have to have 10 people involved bike shedding the fuck out of the fonts instead of having fun...and fucking soul destroying WordPress. All of this is nostalgic.
• pmontra 3y ago
  On the other side we were told that those colorful gradients that will be the fad of the 20s are cheap and we were scolded by professional designers for using them. Not that we had CSS gradients, we were using gifs or jpegs.
  • ogogmad 3y ago
    I don't understand. I'm interested what this means.
    • lofties 3y ago
      We’d generate a 18x1 GIF with a gradient color change (or from a solid color to a transparent color) and stretched that out over however pixels we wanted to create a gradient-like effect. e.g <IMG SRC=“/gradient.gif” HEIGHT=“18” WIDTH=“600”>
      • ogogmad 3y ago
        Gradients look boss.
        • pmontra 3y ago
          Gradients as decoration look boss today. They looked cheap 30 to at least 20 years ago. Then they were forgotten and that made their return possible. They'll become unfashionable again. It's an eternal cycle.
          • WorldMaker 3y ago
            Windows 98/ME and the Office versions of the same time are often blamed for making gradients seem boring and uncool. (Windows put a Gradient in every title bar and Office over-used them in all sort of other ways.) Microsoft was definitely an interesting contributor to both the fad at the time and the "gradients are boring" rejection a few years later because they seemed boring and uptight like an Office program.
• xnorswap 3y ago
  > DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” Is this a joke I don't understand?
  • oleganza 3y ago
    For me personally this is a nice bit of absurdist humour that so few people cherish lately.
  • frereubu 3y ago
    Yeah, I think there's some deliberate mistakes in there for understated comic effect - e.g. "To this day [1x1.gif] is the only way to vertically center elements." The joke (at least the DHTML one) is probably that only people who were developers then will know that's wrong. (Or I suppose this could have been written by someone who wasn't around at that time and this is a bit of faux nostalgia!)
    • metaxy2 3y ago
      I think the joke about it being "the only way to vertically center elements" is just referring to the fact that it's still kind of hard to do vertical centering and there's still no definitive, easy solution after 27 years of CSS. (It's now doable with Flexbox or CSS Grid as well as more obscure hacks, but it's still more fiddly than it should be.) Could be wrong, though. Edit: I think thejohnconway has the answer [1]: the post was written before the Flexbox stuff for vertical centering was widely supported. There were still less nasty options than 1x1 GIFs available, like "display: table-cell", so it's still very likely a joke. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127936
      • neurostimulant 3y ago
        I still need to consult a cheatsheet from time to time when working with flex.
    • thejohnconway 3y ago
      The Flexbox stuff that allows vertical alignment wasn’t widely supported until 2015, a year after this was written.
• justinmarsan 3y ago
  Youngsters need to know how much markup and images we needed for fluid containers with rounded corners... Also did I tell you about CSS-only triangles ?
  • neurostimulant 3y ago
    You'll know the webmaster know their shit when their page has rounded corners everywhere.
• medion 3y ago
  The 1x1.gif, I haven’t thought about that for a long long time!
  • dizhn 3y ago
    I've never seen it as a layout thing but it was used a lot for email tracking.
    • justsomehnguy 3y ago
      Psst, press RMB, 'Inspect Source'.
• j4yav 3y ago
  Honestly, in some ways, borderless tables for layout was nicer than grids and flex boxes.
  • ddalex 3y ago
    Yeah, but is not responsive
    • codingdave 3y ago
      Phones today have higher display resolutions than desktop monitors of the 90s. So table-based layouts would totally fit in mobile-first UX designs.
    • forgotmypw17 3y ago
      I still use tables for layout, partially. In order to make it responsive, I combine multiple tables with inline-block to allow the tables to reflow on the page. There are more "modern" ways of doing this, but I haven't found any that are also compatible with my goals of maintaining backwards compatibility.
• esafak 3y ago
  Don't forget image slicing and image maps! https://www.creativebloq.com/adobe/image-slicing-photoshop-61412081 https://www.creativebloq.com/adobe/image-slicing-photoshop-6... (2014)
  • darkwater 3y ago
    Image maps were top-notch to make menus with graphical buttons on the left, to change the iframe page on the right :)
  • cwdegidio 3y ago
    My first paying client when I was 19 (so around 1998?) commissioned a local high school graphic design student to hand paint this crazy village scene with stores. She then had it professionally scanned and gave me the files... which I then used to create an image map for each of her little "store fronts". She couldn't accept payments online (they didn't teach me that in my community college HTML course), still had to print out an order form and send in a check. I will never forget the horrid repeated plaid background she made me use. I miss the early ugly web lol.
  • jjgreen 3y ago
    Talking of slicing: https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/raggedfloat/demo.html https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/raggedfloat/demo.html
  • alexchantavy 3y ago
    My favorite workflow was to make a totally l33t render with 3dsmax, put it in Photoshop to draw UI buttons, and then use Imageready to slice it and autogenerate the html slices and maps. Instant fancy website that made me a cool kid as far as I was concerned
    • esafak 3y ago
      If you were using 3DS for web design you were legit l33t :) I pulled an all-nighter to hand in a college homework to demonstrate gradient descent using Maya once. Sadly, the teacher was not impressed. Good times.
• conradfr 3y ago
  > To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements. Not true anymore (edit: didn't see the 2014) but the productivity cost of not being able to just "vertical-align: middle;" inside divs for the last 30 years must be billions of dollars. Also does anyone remember the fade of the overline style on :hover links? It must has been around the IE4 or IE6 era. Tables were also used to make divs and buttons with rounded corners, but that was true into the 2000s as well. The agony of designing and splicing them in Photoshop and putting them in table cells...
  • thrdbndndn 3y ago
    Nowadays I just ask ChatGPT to write the CSS for me for that, and amusingly, it seems to be able to produce at least a dozen of solutions (often came with redundant rules, too: like having 5+ rules when 2 or 3 of them are enough). It's hilariously stupid.
    • rekoil 3y ago
      > It's hilariously stupid. No no, it's going to take our jobs! /s
      • zelphirkalt 3y ago
        You joke, but I am pretty sure, that in some heads that idea is already spinning. When can they hire fewer people and make those fewer people simply use ChatGPT or some other model. We might see an even further decline in web quality as a result, as we get even more copy&paste devs.
        • rekoil 3y ago
          Great for me, I work in IT security, and that's gonna tank even harder if people start seriously using ChatGPT in the manner you describe!
        • mleo 3y ago
          Increased productivity and doing certain tasks in less time or with less people has been going on forever and certainly last 30 years in web development. The growing businesses use the extra capacity to expand in other directions whether new products or new features. The stagnant companies continue to struggle with less.
• trojan13 3y ago
  Ah, the 90s - a time when <table> was the answer to every web layout question. Miss aligning your text? <table>. Need a fancy menu? <table>. Creating a full website? Nested <table>s! Who needed CSS when you had rows and cells to hack your way through design? Good old days of <td>-ing everything!
  • unsupp0rted 3y ago
    Still true for email layout in 2024
    • perilunar 3y ago
      Still true for layout in Hacker News in 2024
  • cstuder 3y ago
    But don't forget that you'll have to add the `<font>` tag in _every single cell_.
  • cyberax 3y ago
    I still love tables. They are so awesome for dynamic design. The support column and row spans, alignment, weights. And CSS is still way more complicated than good old tables.
    • toyg 3y ago
      That's because Tables actually map to how digital imaging works: dividing an area into little squares and deciding what to show in it. The screen does it, the driver does it, the window manager does it, the desktop primitives do it... and then you get to the browser screen, and suddenly you have to figure out a byzantine system of self-mutating shapes. I was an early CSS supporter but man, didn't the boffins screw up that one.
      • mmcgaha 3y ago
        Exactly and this is why CSS grid has changed my life. CSS grid is tables on Wheaties.
• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  I still use &nbsp; when writing headlines, to avoid breaking apart 2 key words that should stay together. I also use the non-breaking hyphen for this, which is a different char than the regular hyphen or the em/en dash. > 1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements If you can think of another way to vertically center, I’d like to hear it.
  • kevindamm 3y ago
    Flex box row inside a flex box column, justify: and align: center.
    • asimpletune 3y ago
      Even easier is grid + place contents center
  • unregistereddev 3y ago
    > avoid breaking apart 2 key words that should stay together Yes, this is the correct usage of &nbsp;. That's much saner than using it as a spacing tool.
• LeoPanthera 3y ago
  That’s nothing. The real state of the art was putting a smiley GIF inside a horizontal marquee, inside a vertical marquee, and setting behavior=“alternate” on both marquees. For your pleasure, here’s how to do a marquee in pure CSS: @keyframes marquee { 0% { transform: translateX(100%); } 100% { transform: translateX(-100%); } } .marquee-container { white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; position: relative; animation: marquee 10s linear infinite; } .marquee-content { display: inline-block; } <div class="marquee-container"><div class="marquee-content">Microsoft™ Internet Explorer™ 4.0!</div></div>
  • unregistereddev 3y ago
    Or you put the main table inside a horizontal marquee, and the column that contains your side navigation inside another horizontal marquee that scrolls at twice the speed. Then the navigation "rows" the entire site across the screen.
• jeswin 3y ago
  I don't remember if this was a common technique, but before XmlHttpRequest (came in 2000, i think) we used to do "Ajax" by loading data into an invisible iframe and reading the contents. Worked well iirc.
  • geek_at 3y ago
    Oh right I forgot about that. Also back then (up until ~2005) browsers were hilariously insecure. For example I was in a forum of a local youth club and you could have signatures that were displayed under every post so I added some edgy image linked from my own webserver. Some day I accidentally put the whole folder on a password protection which prompted the "username password" login window on every page my signature was linked to. FOR ALL USERS. I realized users would think that the forum software would ask them to log in again for some reason so I basically got all passwords of people in the forum in plaintext on my webserver. Crazy times
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • arkh 3y ago
    > reading the contents Or having some javascript code in the page loaded by the iframe which could call some parent. function.
    • beejiu 3y ago
      You could even do realtime stuff by leaving the HTTP socket open and writing out script tags when you needed to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)
  • EasyMark 3y ago
    did you ping pong communicate data back and forth between iframe and "main frame" like a queue/pipe?
  • clownbaby 3y ago
• kqr 3y ago
  Wait, I still use dotted underlines and &nbsp; on my blog, and it does get praise for its design. The dotted underlines look nice, but I guess the &nbsp; is just something I used to add to work around layout quirks in Internet Explorer except I never bothered figuring out in which places they're no longer needed...
  • eps 3y ago
    Dotted underlines weren't supported by all browsers. Chrome rendered them as dashes... or was it the IE? Regardless, they weren't "portable" unless hacked using background-image on the offset.
  • loneranger_11x 3y ago
    I still use &nbsp; to put more than one space between 2 words in text. this requirement pops up surprisingly often. Too lazy to wrap them in spans and use paddings!
  • nlunbeck 3y ago
    &nbsp; has been my go-to when I'm working in markdown and don't want to use html elements
• nbittich 3y ago
  I'm sad they didn't even talk about Macromedia flash, Microsoft frontpage and Dreamweaver.
  • vesinisa 3y ago
    They do mention FrontPage though. As far as I can remember, FrontPage was pretty nice. I built my first home page with it. I wanted to (visually) best all of my friends on IRC. So I designed how I wanted the page to look in (an obviously pirated copy of) PaintShop Pro. A sort of an embossed oval with navigation links on the perimeter, with all the page content appearing inside the magic oval. But to wrangle such layout to HTML was not easy in the late 90s. I eventually managed to find out that other pages used <table> elements to force position stuff. FrontPage allowed me to stitch the individual images from PSP to a table in a WYSIWYG environment - I don't think teenager me would have had the patience nor understanding to ever do it without FrontPage. When I evenetually got it to render without glitches in IE I was _so_ proud. The only complaint to my GUESTBOOK I got was from some guy using "lynx" (a CLI web browser) who said navigation was impossible. I only later learned about the "alt" attribute for non-visual users. Not sure if FrontPage would've even allowed me to set it though.
• icodar 3y ago
  In those years, mostly said as web masters, not web developers.
• toxik 3y ago
  Where my frameset people at?
• johnchristopher 3y ago
  I have a rather large website to manage. Based on Tailwind. There are still some fucking &nbsp;&nbsp; and <br /><br /> tags around because the original dev used layout all those text containers over image containers and wasn't told there would one day be no text. N+1 still loves those 1x1 transparent GIF for newsletters.
• ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
  I miss MS FrontPage! I remember how shocked my friends looked whenever they came by and saw it open on my screen. They never understood why I spend hours on that thing instead of just playing games. The first time I thought about learning to code was when I visited Linkin Park's website. Sure, it took 10 long minutes to load but it was a masterpiece of its own. I'd just open the website and stare at it. And one day I just decided that I'm going to make one myself. I'm trying still...
  • 8organicbits 3y ago
    Archive.org has some old copies, maybe you remember this one? Still loads slowly :) https://web.archive.org/web/20011202145112/http://linkinpark.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20011202145112/http://linkinpark...
    • ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
      No, it was from around the launch of meteora iirc. I tried to look it up, but the only copy that have a bearing resemblance to what I remember doesn't load very well as many files seem to be missing. And, the snapshots after that one just keep returning a 302 error :/
      • rezonant 3y ago
        Meteora is such a great album. I got the special edition on CD back in the day, the album art is fantastic.
  • CM30 3y ago
    I remember using FrontPage quite a bit too. It had some... interesting quirks when it came to outputting HTML, but it seemed fine enough for me at the time. Which also reminds me; did anyone actually use the FrontPage Server Extensions they had for it? I remember the tool having a bunch of dynamic features like counters and guestbooks that relied on them being installed, and web hosts sometimes having these extensions listed in their features, but I never saw any sites actually using them.
• charcircuit 3y ago
  >1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements. align-items: center;
  • adamdegas 3y ago
    That's too fancy. I think you mean <center>...</center>
    • urbandw311er 3y ago
      > vertically center
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  Ah yes, transparent images to get equal-width spacing on terrible browser engines like Opera and IE. Tracking pixels. Mixed HTTP and HTTPS content warnings. Java Applets. Perl scripts. cgi-bin. Uploading files one-by-one through a web portal (not even FTP). Building entire sites out of a mosaic of images. Having multiple versions of your site for 800x600, 1024x768, etc.
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    Yeah you try SFTP on Windows FTP thingy then Filezilla too and it obviously fails on both. Plain FTP works but you feel paranoid so upload the zip file of your site via the slow web interface and unzip it on the server.
• narven 3y ago
  DHTML means Dynamic HTML, not distributed html
  • kripy 3y ago
    And SHTML for Server Side Includes.
    • technotarek 3y ago
      Yes! And occasionally, I still miss them.
  • narven 3y ago
    distributed word did not existed in the dictionary back then
  • decremental 3y ago
    I assume it was a joke since he then goes on to talk about Dynamic Drive and would for sure know what DHTML stood for.
  • jahnu 3y ago
    Fairly sure that was a joke given the rest of the paragraph.
  • eps 3y ago
    It was a joke.
• neurostimulant 3y ago
  I love those cursor trail effects. Your geocities page won't be complete without them. Too bad those cursor trails on geocities pages archived at various places doesn't seem to work anymore so we can't experience them again.
• gk1 3y ago
  If you yearn for “the good old days,” consider that we’re living through “the good old days” of AI. In 30 years a blog post like this will poke fun at prompts, chatGPT, chat-with-docs apps, dealing with hallucinations, and what else?
  • JimDabell 3y ago
    Having to bribe AI with $200 tips. Giving them pep talks to convince them they are capable of doing something. Trying to persuade them not to be so gullible they’ll do anything untrusted data asks them to. Telling them you have no hands so that they’ll write code for you. Flattering them by telling them they are an expert in something.
• npteljes 3y ago
  Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners. Or maybe I'm an early 00s web developer with that? The trick is that we created 3×3 tables, and aside of the middle cell, it would contain <img>s, so that the creation was a website element with rounded edges, the pinnacle of human expressiveness. Since HTML emails were also the rage, and email clients updated much slower than browsers, this technique was used well into the 2010s, if you wanted your thing to be displayed correctly.
  • tomnipotent 3y ago
    Will never forget having to create collections of tl.gif, tr.gif, bl.gif etc. images for those 3x3 tables, not to mention the 1x1.gif the article mentioned that was needed for the left/right cell backgrounds to show since browsers at the time didn't render background images of empty cells. Good times.
  • Sharlin 3y ago
    > and aside of the middle cell No no, the middle cell contained the tiled background image, of course!
  • eps 3y ago
    > Don't forget that tables could be used for rounded corners. And drop shadows!
  • padjo 3y ago
    And right at the time we got border radius the design trend changed and nobody wanted round corners anymore
    • RedShift1 3y ago
      I still want round corners! Square corners feel claustrophobic.
      • hbn 3y ago
        They're back now. Hard corners were kind of a big thing in the early 2010s, think Android Holo, Windows 8, etc. I think Apple popularized the return of rounded corners in software with the iPhone X launch, when rounding the corners of smartphone screens became popular. macOS rounded the window corners more, I think with Big Sur. And Microsoft followed suit in Windows 11.
• coolgoose 3y ago
  No mention of the hacks for transparent pngs :P
• thrdbndndn 3y ago
  For all the goodies in this article, I can't forgive the author for not disabling his default round corner css for the icon image! https://i.imgur.com/CJGcSeb.png https://i.imgur.com/CJGcSeb.png
• CM30 3y ago
  Let's not forget frames, the original 'solution' to the problem of having to edit the navigation bar on every page. Unfortunately, you then had to figure out what to do if someone accessed the frame page directly, since search engines could still index these parts of the page seperately. And they always felt jarring and awkward too, since the cutoff between sections was always obvious...
  • steve1977 3y ago
    > since the cutoff between sections was always obvious... and not exactly the same across different browsers. Yes kids, there was a time when not everybody was using the same browser.
    • ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
      Well, actually, there was only a short time, when more than one had been widely used. Something like Mosaic - Netscape - IE - Mozilla/Firefox/The Browser Now Known As Vivaldi/... - Chrome
      • steve1977 3y ago
        I seem to remember Netscape and IE having had similar market shares for a while at that time (the infamous first browser war), but my memories might be distorted to be honest.
        • flir 3y ago
          Netscape was the only game in town at one point. From memory, the three big transitions have been Mosaic > Navigator > IE > Chrome. Here's hoping for another one, just to keep them on their toes.
          • rezonant 3y ago
            Just before Chrome, Firefox was quite popular, at least among the terminally online. But it wasn't enough to take the crown iirc.
• a-dub 3y ago
  who remembers when the hip thing to do was to sign your webpages with a horizonal rule, followed by your name and your email address with a nice blue (on grey) mailto link, all in italics.
  • MandieD 3y ago
    Yes, I absolutely did that, back when personal websites usually had URLs like http://www.subdomain.domainname.net/~username http://www.subdomain.domainname.net/~username
• FriedrichN 3y ago
  The bad good old days, I sure don't miss writing pages with byzantine structures of tables within tables. I do miss web pages that weren't +10MB that load hundreds of JS and CSS files that clog up your computer and may or may not contain malware. I hate that having uMatrix and uBlock Origin installed is pretty much a requirement to use the web nowadays.
  • throwaway0032 3y ago
    I remember 2 brief glorious moments of time when everything just worked, and internet and computer speeds was ahead of web designers. 1. When I switched from modem to ADSL I was amazed how fast the web could be. I think I spent most of the first day just clicking around and watching how everything loaded instantly Then the web designers and product managers caught up and started slowing down the web with larger ads and autoplaying (Flash) videos. 2. When I switched from ADSL to fiber, both my computer and internet was fast enough to counter the crappy parts of a web site and I experienced joy again. Then SPA became the default web site and things started loading slowly again with placeholders and loading indicators. Now that we are moving back to SSR I see a slow return to a more snappy web, all though web designers and product managers will surely find ways to counter this too.
  • JimDabell 3y ago
    > The bad good old days, I sure don't miss writing pages with byzantine structures of tables within tables. People used to jut throw tables everywhere for no reason, like a superstition or something. I remember one day a colleague was stuck because the page he was working on would take over a minute to render in Netscape but about two seconds to render in Internet Explorer. I took a look at the page and somehow he had tables nested twelve levels deep doing absolutely nothing. I deleted all but two of the tables, the layout looked the same but now both browsers rendered the page in under a second.
• ssss11 3y ago
  Remember the <map> tag?!? Also I know someone whose company’s website still runs on coldfusion
• junon 3y ago
  > DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”, was the final feather in our cap of web development tools. Dynamic* Anyway, there's also tables for layout, including Photoshop and Dreamweaver having a slice tool to generate those tables. Also most of the coolest early adopter sites using CSS were anime artist portfolios, because it allowed them to do much cooler stuff. Webpage view counters. Midi files playing when you came to the site. The <font> tag. Oh and <strong> was spelled <b> and <em> was spelled <i>. We also had <u>. XHTML, with very long doctype tags I used to know by heart. Diagonal stripped images that tiled for backgrounds were all the rage. > Pixel fonts Ohh yes. "Visitor" was the most popular one and was everywhere. Not really dev-related but Windows used to make a noise when you would click links. For some reason, when you'd trigger a pop-up or an activeX control the multiple redirects or whatever would cause the click sound to happen over and over again. You knew a site was really turning its gears when there were three or more clicks. Every site wanted you to install a toolbar. I collected them like pokemon, to obvious detriment (spyware galore). You bet I also had Bonzai Buddy or whatever his name was installed. Being 12 was fun. DHTML was wild, alert was like magic. prompt() was also a favorite, haven't seen that one used in ages and it's likely now removed. Downloads had a popup every single time you clicked on it - no download menus. Flash. Shockwave. The other one from Microsoft that was cool for a bit but super convoluted and buggy... oh right, Silverlight I think. PhpBB and vBulletin and Conforums. You were cool if you had a forum signature that was large and commissioned by an artist that likely used PlanetRenders. Bonus points if it was coordinated with your profile picture. X.com still said "coming soon" or something, for decades I swear (everyone wanted x.com and I was always jealous of someone having a domain name with less than three letters). Java applets (RuneScape was a good one). "Sign the guestbook". Overline styles were great fun. Once flash hit, entire sites were made in it. No, text couldn't be selected for the longest time (ever?). Accessibility ("a11y") was but a hilarious concept. Text flying everywhere, blinking, even on fire in some cases. Gifs with their boolean alpha channel making everything so delightfully crispy. Bitmaps were used often since they were the defacto format for MS Paint. Most 1x1's I made were in paint. They had to match the background color you were using since MS Paint didn't support transparency (does it even do that today?) Rounded corners were done using a 3x3 table and images for the corners. No, border radius was not yet conjured up. No, you couldn't rotate the images, you needed 4 different ones. Emojis were not emojis but emoticons and were images, or we had a long dictionary of cool text ones people had dreamed up. Here's chef boyardee, one of my favorites: @=:{D Clipart was exported from Microsoft Word 2003 and used everywhere. Curvey rainbow text images were rampant. Speaking of, text as images when operating systems didn't have the latest cool font or you needed some gradient or something. Oh yeah, gradients in general. Images! bgcolor on the <body> tag. Yahoo's genuinely great articles on website optimization. #anchors in the URL didn't work with the id attribute, you needed an actual <a name="..."> tag. Bonus points for putting content in it and it linking you to your browser's homepage. Ask Jeeves (which then turned into Ask.com). Babelfish translator. The speech to text software that was either parrot or turtle branded. TortoiseSVN to download the sources for your favorite private server source code. Filezilla deploy your site over FTP. It was the web developer's version of the "compiling!" meme, thing took forever. Web rings, where people would link to the next site in the ring. Lists of IP addresses you supposedly weren't supposed to ping. Got those from HellboundHackers and hackthissite forums. BBCode. You were really cool if you implemented that. Comet frames to implement live chat (before XMLHttpRequest or "AJAX", now simply fetch(), was a thing). Iframes before any of that. PHP errors being dumped to the webpage, inline. You always knew someone's mysql server was down. HTML comments that were actually if statements to switch out tags for IE. <noscript> "Created by Microsoft FrontPage" Macromedia Coldfusion Waiting 8 hours to download a 200MiB game client. for (var k in obj) if (obj.hasOwnProperty(k)) ... being burned into memory. On that note, actually using .prototype or I think .__proto__ Custom HTML headers had to be prefixed with X- Java Server Pages (JSP) and ASP being the tabs vs spaces of backend development. Low Orbit Ion Cannon ... alright I'm done :D I miss the old web. EDIT: okay okay I'm really done now.
• gasparto 3y ago
  I still miss browser bouncers: "Sorry kiddo. No Netscape in here. Boss created this stuff for IE only."
  • autoexec 3y ago
    Those still exist, but sites don't tell you about it anymore. Instead the sites are just broken for you. We do still get notices for using for ad blockers on some sites at least. https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/18autyy/cnncom_blocking_browser_because_of_ublockorigin/ https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/18autyy/cnnco...
• schnitzelstoat 3y ago
  Obviously the technology was a lot worse. But I kind of miss the internet of back then when websites would still be made and run by ordinary people. As ugly as those websites were, it felt a lot more genuine and democratic than today.
  • jj999 3y ago
    try https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
• foofie 3y ago
  The page is missing the "under construction" image.
• idkwhoiam 3y ago
  Been there done that. Conditional CSS includes, CSS selector hacks to target different browsers. Good times. We also used JAVA applets for Ajax
• dariosalvi78 3y ago
  and still it was something a lot of people would start playing with. Open Frontend, drag and drop a couple of images, write some content, done, you have a website, you can be a millionaire. Nowadays just getting started with latest frontend framework -that became obsolete 2 hours ago- means weeks of learning, and you've not even started. Jokes aside (yes you can start with simple HTML today too), back in the days the expectations were pretty low, which made the web ugly but accessible and fun, though awkward and hacky.
• q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  Speaking of the greatness of the 90s, does anyone have a good version of the classic "Under Construction" GIF? You know the one — it was in the style of a yellow road sign, and on it was a pixelated silhouette of a construction worker diligently shoveling. Long before Gmail had the smug audacity to leave "Beta" on their product name, you could use this GIF (or even a whole row of them!) to proudly announce to the world that your site was — like all great works of art — never complete. I've searched high and low for the classic version of this GIF — the true, original, platonic ideal — but all I've been able to find are poor knockoffs.
  • Sharlin 3y ago
    http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/ If it isn't here, it probably can't be found anywhere.
    • this_is_not_you 3y ago
      Thanks, that made me laugh out loud because of pure joy.
  • i_like_robots 3y ago
    Take a look on https://gifcities.org/ https://gifcities.org/ - I'm sure you'll find what you're looking for!
  • giantrobot 3y ago
    The other replies might sort you out but if they don't, check out some of the shareware/CD-ROM collections on the Internet Archive. They have thousands of ISOs of magazine inserts, shareware discs, and all kinds of discs from the 90s. They're each like little time capsules so you may end up finding that image or ones like it on those.
• nikos3194 3y ago
  One thing used a lot before CSS and JS was the "usemap" attribute in the img tags to make hyperlinks within images. You had to indicate the coords and whether the shape of the hiperlink was a poly, rect or circle.
• Galanwe 3y ago
  The article could mention the wave of "semantic web" at the end of the period. The idea was to create a DTD+XML for your website and publish it with meaningful tags. Then you could distribute XSLT sheets that the browser applied, and have total separation of style and content.
• jdefr89 3y ago
  This brought a damn tear to my eye. The Internet was so damn cool back in the late 90s and early 2000s…
• jbverschoor 3y ago
  DHTML, layer vs div.. Also, JSRS was one of the first hackidy ways to do 'ajax'. Negative margins to fix layouts..
• scopeh 3y ago
  90s-early 00s. The glory days.
• drikerf 3y ago
  Good times! I really enjoyed making a 90s version of my startup's landing page: https://90s.wobaka.com/ https://90s.wobaka.com/
• bubble12345 3y ago
  I just remember making websites using <TABLE WIDTH=100%>, and at some point reading that CSS and using <div>'s was the new, more correct way to do it. I only need a simple personal website for academics, so I still use tables for the layout.
• throwaway0032 3y ago
  One thing I miss from the 90s are the built in user/password dialog that enabled me to easily remember passwords. It still exists, but most sites prefer to use their own HTML based logins because it "looks ugly". Imagine if sites used the built in dialog; We would have a much more secure web. We would not have a need for dedicated password managers and would probably have found a low effort way of integrating auto generated passwords.
  • jakub_g 3y ago
    Do you mean the one which popped up from the browser UI before anything on the page has loaded? (aka "HTTP authentication") Wasn't this abysmal? You navigate to some page, and out of nowhere it asks you for login, before you even see any content of the page. (Kind of like logging via terminal)
    • throwaway0032 3y ago
      It wasn't an optimal solution, but it also didn't change much from the first implementation. I think that if it had been given a bit more attention and made it more customizable, it could have evolved into something good enough to replace today's login form.
  • aembleton 3y ago
    Firefox seems to manage this with current HTML based logins.
  • Paianni 3y ago
    You mean Basic HTTP Authentication? I wouldn't say Chrome's dialog looks 'ugly'.
  • JimDabell 3y ago
    You can’t log people out or switch users with HTTP auth. Once the browser knows you have valid credentials, it sends them with every request and the site can’t stop it from doing so.
• Spare_account 3y ago
  Not a single use of the word 'webmaster' in the whole article. Was Zach even around in the 90s? ;-)
  • sen 3y ago
    Still got my “Webmaster” business cards from the late 90s. No one will ever understand how “cool” it was to have that title back then. Now even I cringe when looking at them but so many good memories.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • flir 3y ago
      Hope you had a Nokia 7110 to go with it. I know I did. Living 15 minutes into the future. shhhhh-clunk.
    • tasuki 3y ago
      Why do you cringe? The titles of today, such as Site Reliability Engineer, are way more cringey...
    • throwaway167 3y ago
      Not only was it full stack, but user/community management, strategy, perhaps sales, all rolled into one.
    • fuzzfactor 3y ago
      Yes, that's as far as you should have to go when it comes to somebody ultimately responsible for a whole website ;)
  • commandlinefan 3y ago
    I worked with a woman who officially referred to herself a "webmistress". Not as a joke.
• weinzierl 3y ago
  Scrolling text was a staple of the demo scene long before it came to the web as `<marquee>`. Of course it was not just scrolling lazily from left to right back then. It would hop up and down[1], run backwards sometimes and change its already exuberant colors. If it got really fancy the letters flew along an ever changing lissajous figure or had a faux reflection below, sometimes even with faux water perturbations. Yes, the web was a real step back. Sensory overload became one-dimensional and we were deprived from the ability to annoy our visitors not only horizontally but also vertically. We are still recovering from that. [1] Hopped along what looked like a sine wave to the unwitting eye, but really came from a tiny table of pre-calculated values of a quarter sine, carefully reduced to the bare minimum number of entries that still looked sinusy enough.
  • tdeck 3y ago
    Allow me to introduce you to the concept of a regular marquee inside a <marquee direction=down behavior=alternate> Unbelievably the website where I learned how to use these tags is still online: http://www.funkychickens.com/marqs2.asp http://www.funkychickens.com/marqs2.asp
    • weinzierl 3y ago
      The Inception of web design! Of course it's an asp page, what else did I expect. Only missing a MIDI background track to be perfect.
• jasode 3y ago
  >1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements. HN was launched February 2007 and uses <TABLE> and 1x1 gif to set the indentation level of comments. <table border='0'> <tr> <td class='ind' indent='0'> <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="0"></td><td valign="top" class="votelinks"> <table border='0'> <tr> <td class='ind' indent='1'> <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="40"></td><td valign="top" class="votelinks"> <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="80"></td><td valign="top" class="votelinks"> <img src="s.gif" height="1" width="120"></td><td valign="top" class="votelinks"> The 1x1 s.gif is also used on the front page of stories at the bottom of the page to add spacing above the orange divider line: <tr><td><img src="s.gif" height="10" width="0"><table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1"><tr><td bgcolor="#ff6600"></td></tr></table><br>
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • EasyMark 3y ago
    If it ain't broke!
• addandsubtract 3y ago
  Another big one from the 90s: splash pages. A single page dedicated to introduce and set the tone for a website. Click to enter.
  • CalRobert 3y ago
    Ah, and maybe I could choose the 28.8 vs. DSL version of the page!
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jakub_g 3y ago
  No 90s/00s website would be complete without a "best viewed in 800x600 resolution" button. If you wanted to go fancy, you'd also put "Valid HTML 4.01". Another goodie: ads used to be simple standard sized <img> banners, instead of the crazy JavaScript bundles & video ads like today. I remember being in shock when I realized that Norton Internet Security 2003 was silently rewriting HTML on the pages I visit and removing `<img width=468 height=60>` banners (and a few other standard ad sizes) but keeping everything else. (20-years old confirmation that adblockers are a security solution! ;)
• lmm 3y ago
  > Internet Explorer 4.0 was perfection incarnate in a browser. It had Active Desktop. It had Channels. It had motherfucking Channels, the coolest technology that never reached market adoption ever not even a little bit. Are you sure? There's some pretty stiff competition even in IE4: VRML was incredible, as were Tclets. Seriously web technology has mostly gone backwards since then. CSS has needed multiple revisions to reach the point where on a good day it can barely match what you could do in HTML3. <video> is a worse <embed>. Chrome remembers and syncs my passwords if I type them into the input of a HTML form, but not if I use the actual native HTTP authentication, and forget trying to use proper public key certificates like worked perfectly in 1996...
• p4bl0 3y ago
  This comment is best read using IE and a screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels. It's funny how a small article like this can bring so many memories! Thanks for sharing :).
• Gabrys1 3y ago
  > Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation Wrong. Marquee only worked in IE, but blink only worked in non-IE, so by embedding one in the other you simply had an attention grabbing element that either blinked or slides.
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  > DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” "Dynamic", I think; not "distributed".
  • EvanAnderson 3y ago
    That's my memory, too. I saw "distributed" and did a double-take.
  • gnz11 3y ago
    Yes, "Dynamic" is the term. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
  • gortok 3y ago
    Was hoping someone would come here and say this, although we're getting to the point where if we don't write it down we won't remember it, and mandela ourselves out of how things actually were.
  • moron4hire 3y ago
    It's amazing how many people get this wrong while claiming they were big into web development "in the 90s". DHTML was the beginning of the Document Object Model API. It was about changing things on the page through JS and not anything to do with the `alert()` function as the OP claims.
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  > tiny six-point font I remember it more as a "eight-point" font and its multiple (next ideal being 16-point). Not in the 90s, but in the early 2000s, I reaped Pixel Fonts' benefit to its fullest. Besides using it as part of the graphics and later sliced for HTML, I used it to render many elements of Apps/programs for Pocket PC devices -- iPAQ[1]. Even though the devices were small, they were handheld and usually used closer to the eyes than desktops, and the pixel fonts were ideal size to give enough spacing and clarity to buttons and even for the smaller text that goes in the mandatory legal writings that need to go with the programs used by Healthcare professionals. I was lucky to be involved in creating a few such programs for physicians and clinics, making them really happy users. I remember that positioning other fonts (I think, system fonts, etc) was hard to maintain and turned out blurry when deployed to these devices. The Pixel Fonts were crisp and clear when re-aligned after calculating either an even or an odd pixel placement. It was my second job and first Internet/Web-related Job. My boss was super happy that he spent money on my suggested items, which were repaid repeatedly. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
• recursivedoubts 3y ago
  the dream of the 90s is alive at https://htmx.org https://htmx.org
• shever73 3y ago
  Ah, yes, 90s web development. Somewhere, in a dark and hidden corner of archive.org lives my first website. Updated in 1996 to be "enhanced" for Netscape Navigator 2.0. It had a lot of what this article spoke about - including a page counter, guestbook and my first attempt at this new browser language called "JavaScript". https://imgur.com/a/4bgnCLt https://imgur.com/a/4bgnCLt
• dghughes 3y ago
  That's a blast from the past. I remember image maps and the struggle to put one on my site. It was called DeskNexus.com sometime in the early to mid 1990s. It was so long ago that I forget when it was. My idea was to have a website as your desktop instead of your computer so you could access it anywhere.
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Ah... the one-pixel transparent GIF trick (I sometimes, still use it, for iOS stuff -but for different reasons). Brings back memories of my halcyon days... I pine for the days, when all Web pages looked like so: https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/ https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/
• locallost 3y ago
  Looking back at it, the weirdest thing in the list have to be pixel fonts. Back then I used them and I liked them, but today it seems like a foolish gimmick. My only thought is that it's a testament to the fact those days were for young people and they mostly didn't have issues with their sight. Today we are starting to think about reading glasses and the web is ubiquitous so readable content is beating pretty content (whatever pretty means).
  • JimDabell 3y ago
    I just remember there was a particular web design site that was popular with web designers that used a 10px pixel font. Every designer I knew spent so long staring at awful sites like that, they trained themselves to perceive any reasonably sized text as “massive”. Trying to get them to design something that was actually readable was a nightmare. 12px text was as far as they were willing to go for body copy.
• MulliMulli 3y ago
  Anyone still remembers AOLpress?
• steveBK123 3y ago
  Feeling nostalgic right now
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• petecooper 3y ago
  I'm _slightly_ triggered by the border radius on the 88x31 .gif, but I'll cope. Related (and brace yourself if you're on an older computer): https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31 https://neonaut.neocities.org/cyber/88x31 https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/ https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/
• supertron 3y ago
  This is such a superb article. I'd forgotten about a lot of this. I used to be a grandmaster of creating any layout imaginable with tables and 1x1 pixel Gifs... So. Many. Tables...
• dudul 3y ago
  I'm surprised there is no mentions of tables to organize the page layout. Massive nostalgia wave after reading this post. Building websites back then was so fun.
• moondev 3y ago
  > DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”, Um excuse me? This kills the credibility of the article for me. It's "dynamic html" and as a card carrying member of the dhtmlcentral forums we are the authority on the DHTML subject and lifestyle.
  • sumanthvepa 3y ago
    Yup. The article lost all credibility instantly there.
  • dbalatero 3y ago
    I thought it was just a joke.
  • brazzy 3y ago
    Pretty sure that was intentional, given the tone of the article.
• asimpletune 3y ago
  Any body else get online with Juno?
  • daedalus_j 3y ago
    Oh man, there's a name I haven't thought about in a long time.... I think they may have been my first foray into the actual web from BBS'. I remember it being pretty dang cool that you could write your emails offline and then dial up to do the send/receive...
    • asimpletune 3y ago
      Yeah and tying up my parent’s phone line, secretly, bc thug as no idea what the internet was. Also there was no dmca so websites literally had sierra and Lucas arts games for download.
  • Izkata 3y ago
    Yep, they had that always-on-top ad banner in a separate window that you couldn't close. At some point I figured out if you start StarCraft and go online, letting it launch Juno's client instead of launching it manually, the ad banner wouldn't show up.
• asolove 3y ago
  The year is 1996. Microsoft's homepage has a menu bar that expands when you move your mouse over it. I am determined to figure out how this works. At the time, IE has a "view source" button, but it's not very platform aware. You get a Notepad doc. The server is running Unix with files where lines break on "\n" and I'm on Windows, which needs "\r", so the source is one single long line of html. I look through the source thoroughly: what is in their html that I don't know about that lets them make things move around? All the html tags are ones I know. All the content is text I can see on the page. The only mysterious bit is these "&nbsp;"s. I've never seen those before and don't know what they are. They appear on sites with moving menus. They must be related. (For six months, I believed the effect of dhtml was achieved through magic incantations of what turned out to be html entities. A bit later I found WebMonkey tutorials and this turned into a whole career.)
  • enobrev 3y ago
    View source was my launchpad. Minimizers and compilers are great, but I so miss reading through the well manicured and maintained source of a well-designed site. I wish we could have gone with a type of compression that allowed us to keep the original source formatting for perusing production code, and ideally keep the expectation that others from around the world will be reading our code. I imagine it had a lot to do with how quickly this thing has progressed early on. It's definitely a big part of my own origin story in this industry.
    • tracker1 3y ago
      When Adobe bought Macromedia, my hope was for the flash format to largely become a Zip file with SVG, JS and other assets as a package. MS Silverlight was close, but too late as flash died and people stopped installing browser plugins.
      • enobrev 3y ago
        Right there with you. I was a huge fan of AS3 and build some great client projects with it. When using types, it very closely resemble Typescript in a lot of ways. I was hoping for open standards and eventual direct browser integration.
• Joeboy 3y ago
  So many clever solutions to the problem of HTML being too easy.
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  <blink>Never forget what they took from us.</blink>
• jim_lawless 3y ago
  On the server side, I remember it being challenging trying to figure out how to run CGI's ... usually in Perl ... on a given site. Some sites had Perl 4, some had Perl 5. Your code might have needed either the .pl or .cgi file extension. Sometimes the CGI script just needed to be in the /cgi-bin/ directory with execute permissions set and the appropriate hashbang in the top comment. While there were more elaborate Perl CGI libraries, I preferred to use cgi-lib.pl.
• alamsterdam 3y ago
  Using vi to update the .html directly on the production server (and this wasn't a personal website)... simpler times :)
  • chasd00 3y ago
    lol yeah, ssh to the server, find the www dir, edit, :w, hit reload, :q when it works :)
    • alamsterdam 3y ago
      I could deploy to production 30 times a minute! haha :)
• Uptrenda 3y ago
  When I think of 90s websites I think of a design trend where everything used tables, borders, and a crap load of gifs. A common design for sites is this basic pattern: [nav bar ...] [link1 ] content ... [link...] content ... All sites looked like a variation of this. Normally people were OCD so everything was carefully contained in its own box. This was kind of the opposite to today's 'flat design.' Where today everything blends seamlessly and the edges are implied by contrasts older sites didn't try hide their boundaries. There wasn't really many front-end libraries. Front-end was mostly just templates and PHP. Large-scale web software was all just PHP + templates + HTML with minimal javascript. PHP was quite instrumental for the early for the early web. It's still huge honestly. By the way: lets not forget that Git only came out in 2005 and that had a significant effect on how software was managed. The version control before them was painful and web devs weren't always the kind of engineers to use them.
• pocketsand 3y ago
  For me, the life changer was SSI. You mean I can just include files and not copy menus all over the place? I also remember being enamored by image maps. Mapping out the polygons without software was beyond the confidence I had as an 11 year old. And a self-hosted CGI-backed counter--the holy grail.
• donatj 3y ago
  > DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML” > Sites like Dynamic Drive meant that instead of thinking through creative solutions for problems you face, you could just copy and paste this 50 line block of code and everything would be fixed. DHTML in this context stood for Dynamic HTML, not “distributed”, hence the Dynamic of Dynamic Drive.
  • layer8 3y ago
    I was wondering if this was meant to allude to the “you could just copy and paste” a bit further down. And maybe a riff on DCOM.
  • xnorswap 3y ago
    Discussed down-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127528 Conclusion was that it's a joke, but not a good one.
  • blantonl 3y ago
    "Technology of Terror" as the description still stands though with no rebuttal.
  • TravisCooper 3y ago
    So, so much time spent on DynamicDrive. It was the future. Thanks for the reminder!
  • beauzero 3y ago
    A person I know won a Microsoft contest when this was first announced and rolled out. Here's to you Scotty. A very smart person at a company full of them in the late 90's. I was one of the dumbest around in a place packed with talent. Never worked at a place as smart since.
  • SpaceNoodled 3y ago
    Wow, he really did find the No Fun Crowd here.
  • gscott 3y ago
    Coping scripts from Dynamic Drive made people think I was some sort of Web God.
• donatj 3y ago
  Image Maps were huge in the 90s. You’d have your landing page or header navigation as a giant image and just define shapes around the areas you wanted to be buttons. Saved you from having to chop the image up into tables. <input type=image> was similar but processed server side, clicking the image submits the form and reports the clicked X and y to the server. We used this at my first job a ton for maps. The MDN article actually doesn’t do this input type justice and misses their true use. HTTP 204 was huge too, and something I still use. Early way to send a message to the server without a page refresh before AJAX. If a request responds with a 204 the browser stays on the current page. Lots of star rating systems like on Amazon and early Netflix for instance used this. Click a star, link makes the request, 204 keeps you on the current page. Sometimes you’d add a little JS to pretty the interaction up. CSS active was usually good enough.
• fortunajs 3y ago
  Made me desperately want to look in my storage for the CD with "100 000 web design assets" and open frontpage express again ... :)
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  using transparent png's to give a rounded corner look which was all the rage in the "web 2.0" era. miss those days.
• trumbitta2 3y ago
  I used to greatly enjoy the author's content, before - you know - this: https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-github-harassment/ https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-gi...
  • IntelMiner 3y ago
    Are you sure that's the same person? The site seems to belong to "Zach Holman" [1] But the blog post attributes to "Aja Romano" [2] [1] https://zachholman.com/about https://zachholman.com/about [2] https://www.dailydot.com/author/aja-romano/ https://www.dailydot.com/author/aja-romano/
    • trumbitta2 3y ago
      I'll rephrase my comment: I used to greatly enjoy Zach Holman's content, before - you know - he allegedly (?) did what this story tells us he did: https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-gi https://www.dailydot.com/business/julie-ann-horvath-names-gi...
• kopollo 3y ago
  I remembered this, what happened?
• pkorzeniewski 3y ago
  I recommend The Geocities Gallery [1] to go back in time and experience the 90s web yourself, there is something beautiful about all these personal web pages. Each one has a distinct look that alone can tell a lot about the author's personality, usually contains some bio info together with several random personal pictures, lists of recommended links with short descriptions, loose talk about their hobbies and so on - it's just so personal and calming, a striking contrast to today's social media where each profile page looks the same (bland and boring), with overwhelming, ever growing amount of content and a pressure to maintain a certain image of one's life. [1] https://geocities.restorativland.org/ https://geocities.restorativland.org/
  • tracker1 3y ago
    I remember using the brick background from windows, combined with transparent GIF graffiti in the mid 90s to create a pretty cool effect. Early efforts from the BBS art groups like ACID, ICE, FIRE etc was also very cool at the time. Anything more advanced prior to IE5/6s dominance was relegated Flash though. I built a framework similar to React around E4X in the early 00s. ActionScript/Flash/Flex, Mozilla/Netscape supported it and VB.Net's XML literal notation was similar. MS and Google wouldn't adopt it and then JSON became king.
  • SamBam 3y ago
    Man, thanks for the rabbit hole. I spent a while there, both trying to find my old site (I don't recall which directory under Area51 it was in, and it may never have been archived) and just reliving it. Memory is weird. Somehow viewing Geocities made me recall the smell of the old internet. Probably just the smell of the family room where the computer was.
• tracker1 3y ago
  Missing mention of Flash/Shockwave. That said I've missed all the things mentioned. And I don't miss it. Days where IE4, NN4 and a huge margins of stealing browsers existed all at once. Nobody was willing to take the literal hours to download a new browser over dialup. Hell, people rarely ran windows updates. I still remember IE 5.0 that was on the office 2000 and Windows 2000 disks (not ME). It broke the legacy interface for manipulation of select controls. 5.0.1 fixed that, but it was too late. I remember when IE8's JSON parsee broke with an error you can't catch if you used the prototype library or similar. IE4, NN4 and IE5/NN5 had different, largely incompatible interface for dynamic elements. Want a form to show a field based on another field selection, client side and cross browser, omg it was a pain. Stack diagrams and giant charts, so much fun. People complain about the packages and how painful it is today... I'll keep what we have. While I think HTMX does a better job for many things today, I'll still live text more than front end web development in the mood-late 90s.
  • forgotmypw17 3y ago
    >I still remember IE 5.0 that was on the office 2000 and Windows 2000 disks (not ME). It broke the legacy interface for manipulation of select controls. 5.0.1 fixed that, but it was too late. Do you happen to remember more details about this. In particular, what method worked for the IE 5.0 that was broken? I develop a framework that aims for universal browser support, and I'd like to account for this.
    • tracker1 3y ago
      It was just IE 5.0.0.. there was an offer interface and the new dom interface. IE5 initially only supported the new one. I honestly wouldn't even worry about it today. I don't even recall what the method was. Both probably still work in current browsers. The bigger manipulation and the older interface.
• Jemm 3y ago
  "Can you move it a half pixel to the left"
• askonomm 3y ago
  I'm a 2000's programmer, but I still remember a lot of this stuff. Anyone remember doing rounded corners with a 3x3 table where the corners were GIF's/PNG's cut from Photoshop to create the illusion of a rounded div?
• w3news 3y ago
  Good old times, when the web was simple, and more decentralized
• PaulHoule 3y ago
  This book changed my life https://www.killersites.com/killerSites/3-pdf/press.pdf https://www.killersites.com/killerSites/3-pdf/press.pdf The author got a lot of complaints for abusing HTML and became an early advocate for CSS and the semantic web.
• somat 3y ago
  The server side image map. True story. I am the worlds worst web programmer, that is I am not a web programmer, I am a sys-admin that occasionally makes web based tooling. And as such my web skills are stuck in the early 2000's. On top of that I have this terrible aversion to javascript(I am already writing a code generator in one language to create a second language, now you want me to throw a third language on top of that... no thanks). On one of my recent tools I needed to do some basic operations involving points on a picture. it probably would have been 5 lines of javascript, the only 5 lines of javascript in the whole infernal thing. No thanks, I won't be having any of that in my program, I am going with server side image maps... in 2023... yeah. So now instead of 5 lines of JS I now have 50 lines of python managing state and a special case in the request handler to handle the screwball fragment syntax. I cringe a little, but am also strangely enough, a little proud of getting the thing to work at all.
  • Magodo 3y ago
    > only 5 lines of javascript in the whole infernal thing. No thanks, I won't be having any of that in my program I feel exactly the same way. HTMX is a godsend. That and a Tailwind UI purchase can make anybody very dangerous at frontend. I'm curious for other viewpoints though: what exactly about js gives that icky feeling. For me it's just the inconsistent syntax. With TS, on the other hand just seeing a node modules folder makes me nauseous. The whole thing gives me a feeling of a lack of control over what's happening and has thrown me off front end for many years until now
    • somat 3y ago
      Sure the language is a little iffy, but as someone who enjoys shell scripting I have used worse. I think what I don't like is managing the logic two steps removed from where it is used. I tend to write my web apps in what is referred to today as server side rendered(Which sounds stupid to me, I am not rendering anything, I am outputting html for the html terminal to render) as such, all my logic is on one end, and mixing in logic, in a different language, for the other end feels really ugly. I have recently tried to be a better person and get more comfortable with javascript. What I have found that works is to completely invert the logic dynamics, give the browser a single static page that has nothing in it. only a single script tag that includes a javascript file. Then generate the whole page from that. Now all your logic is still in one language[1] and really javascript is a lot of fun to write, the language is still sort of crap, but now the dynamic stuff is really simple. 1. as a footnote, the great tragedy of the web is that (script language=) only works for javascript. wasm is an attempt to rectify this, but I think that while they are doing the best they can with the shitshow they have to work with. wasm is solving the problem at entirely the wrong layer.
• TravisCooper 3y ago
  Another great memory was writing "broken" HTML comment tags so you could disable "auto-inserted" ads from Geocities and Angelfire (and other) sites so you could look cool with your premium, ad-free site.
• romanhn 3y ago
  I remember all of these fondly. Though IMO the real hacks came with trying to get IE6 to comply when the rest of the world moved on. Basic things, like getting transparent PNGs to be, you know, transparent... img { filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(...); }
• hbarka 3y ago
  Can we also talk about Active Server Pages? *.asp has endured the test of time.
• justinzollars 3y ago
  I think I would include <iframe>
• atum47 3y ago
  DHTML stands for dynamic HTML, right? Never understood the name though, it was just JavaScript animating DOM elements. Maybe i was too young to understand the difference, but i remember using text inputs for animated contet, like a clock or a scrolling message. Anyways, I was about 10 or 11 when visiting a "big" city i saw this book about DHTML and I had my dad buying it for me.
  • giantrobot 3y ago
    Before DHTML JavaScript had limited ability to manipulate DOM elements after the page had loaded. JavaScript could happily edit the document (document.write) during the page load but not afterwards. If you wanted some output of a JavaScript displayed after the page load you had to put the output inside form elements or do an alert. You also could manipulate some parts of the browser with the navigator object and change the status and title. Dynamic HTML was dynamic because the DOM could be manipulated after the page was loaded. JavaScript could directly manipulate DOM elements or even add and remove elements.
    • atum47 3y ago
      Nice. My comment was about the author saying DHTML stands for distributed HTML, which i find odd
• danielovichdk 3y ago
  I used to serve the 1x1 gif from an asp page that at the same time would gather visitor information. It was the tracking pixel.
• angst_ridden 3y ago
  Oh, and remember the glory of Frames!? How many hours did I spend slicing images in Photoshop and coding tables with rowspans? Funny that coding HTML email is still not far from that experience (table-based layouts) if you want it to work in email clients like desktop Outlook.
  • sosborn 3y ago
    For the life of me I cannot understand why email won't render grid or flex. Those two properties would make email templating so much easier.
    • monkeynotes 3y ago
      I'd be happy if we didn't have to inline all the CSS.
• blibble 3y ago
  I think the most obscure thing I used was <keygen>, which would generate a client key/cert pair, store the key locally in your browser certificate store and send the cert to the server with the form submission I saw exactly one website use it and remember being very confused as to how it achieved that https://web.archive.org/web/20160409081411/https://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20080714/07ea5534/attachment.txt https://web.archive.org/web/20160409081411/https://lists.wha...
  • napolux 3y ago
    Tried to make it work, guess support is gone for good in latest firefox/chrome
  • EvanAnderson 3y ago
    I sure wish <keygen> had had a good UI. We could be living in a world where two factor authentication based on PKI and personal HSMs would have been a thing. (I'm sure I'm thinking of it thru nostalgia-colored glasses...)
    • WorldMaker 3y ago
      Passkeys are getting close. Might be any day now.
• angst_ridden 3y ago
  Oh, and who can forget the “splash page flash movie” that you had to sit through? It was vital that the brand got to show you their vibe before you could access any actual information… I knew a guy who bought several expensive sports cars as testament to his ability to do shockwave animations back in ‘97.
• drivers99 3y ago
  > Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? If you did, it would blink on Netscape, and it would be a marquee in IE, but not both (in the 90s!). Netscape had blink and IE had marquee and did not support the other[1][2], at least in the 90s. [1] blink: "some, such as Internet Explorer, never supported the element at all" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_element [2] marquee: "the first time I tried Netscape 7, in 2002. Netscape 7 and its close descendent (sic) are, as far as I can tell, the only web browsers to support both <blink> and <marquee>." https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/ https://danq.me/2020/11/11/blink-and-marquee/
• chrisstanchak 3y ago
  My friend invented rounded corners in tables
• dunham 3y ago
  Back in the day I disabled blink tags by editing the Netscape binary (in emacs) to change the string "blink" to something else. A little earlier than that, I remember a use-after-free of a graphics context in Amiga Mosaic that would cause it to occasionally render in another window.
• 1905 3y ago
  What about white text on white background to stuff keywords on the bottom of a page.....and it actually worked
• JoblessWonder 3y ago
  I have a printed book of "good" website design examples from the late 90's. It is an amazing time capsule. I also really wish there was an archive of AOL's homepages... My first website is lost to the digital abyss...
  • throwaway2046 3y ago
    What's the book called?
    • JoblessWonder 3y ago
      I'll have to look when I get home. It blows my mind because there was nothing stopping me from just... loading the websites.... I had the internet. But I was a kid/teenager and used the book for inspiration.
  • slater 3y ago
    Oh man, you just reminded me I have this book somewhere: Web Design Annual 1999: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4766110781 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/4766110781 it is amazing edit: oh crap, it's available on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/webdesignannual100webd https://archive.org/details/webdesignannual100webd
• PeterCorless 3y ago
  I am totally the guy who put all the &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; into www.cisco.com back in the day.
• burningChrome 3y ago
  I remember at my first developer gig, one of our developers was so proud of the site she built for her local elementary school she was talking non-stop about it for two days. On the third day she sent out an email with the subject line "FML" with only a few words in the body of the email. Something to the effect of, "It only took them THREE DAYS to ruin their site." When I opened the link, the school had put a large blinking announcement in bright red letters about the upcoming Christmas break at the top of the page. Of course, with the scrolling marquee down at the bottom before the footer indicating the dates for the upcoming Christmas vacation. See this again reminded me of Victoria and her basking in her short lived glory.
• pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > 88x31 I polled some coworkers, all of whom are younger than me, asking if the numbers "88x31" had any particular meaning to them. Not a single one has apparently experienced this.
  • bdcravens 3y ago
    I'm 47 and put many of those buttons on sites in the late 90s, and don't remember those numbers
• andreygrehov 3y ago
  css sprites, <marquee>, <blink>, <font color="red">, <div bgcolor="#000000">, <img src="/cgi-bin/webcounter.cgi"> :)
  • arealaccount 3y ago
    sprites were level 100 webmaster magic. They'd probably be just as relevant today in the age of +5mb webpages and mobile networks, but you never hear about them anymore.
• bdcravens 3y ago
  Putting cellpadding=0 and cellspacing=0 in all of our table tags
• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  90s web developers prefer the title "webmaster"
• taude 3y ago
  1x1 gifs are still commonly used in emails, aka tricky-pixels!