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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 w
by 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 agoWell, 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 agoI 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 agoNetscape 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.
- tracker1 3y agoThey did, even worse, there was a time when both Netscape and IE were common. But also multiple versions with incompatible rendering and features.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoIf you are being framed by other websites, you deploy your 'frame-buster' script. If your page is orphaned without your own frames, then you summon your 'frame-joiner' script.
- rezonant 3y agoAnd if you mess up the domain detection, it just navigates perpetually between the two.
- Sharlin 3y agoNot just that, but also the solution for having the navigation (and ads! can't forget the ads!) stay on the screen when you scroll down…
- thriftwy 3y agoThat and also tables (with invisible borders), which was the content positioning before CSS tool of choice and went way into the 2010s.
- throwaway744678 3y ago> and went way into the 2010s. Unfortunately, it is still used for html formatted emails
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoYeah. If you ever want to feel nostalgic about old-school web development, go build an email template.
- rezonant 3y agoThis continually blows my mind. Even Gmail is this way. If they just put a flex box in there it'd be mostly fine.
- CM30 3y agoIf I had to hazard a guess, it'd be that HTML email is probably one of the lowest priority things on the roadmap over at Google or Microsoft. The vast majority of regular folks sending emails send mostly plain text, and even many company sent emails also on the basic side (though with these limitations, it's probably self reinforcing there). Add this how more complex emails could potentially lead to security issues for their webmail clients and waht not... And well, "eh, good enough" is probably the order of the day.
- perilunar 3y agoUnfortunately, it is still used to format Hacker News.
- europeanNyan 3y agoFrames are still used as underlying microfrontend technology with surprising success. Theory available at https://martinfowler.com/articles/micro-frontends.html#Run-timeIntegrationViaIframes https://martinfowler.com/articles/micro-frontends.html#Run-t... and an implementation at https://luigi-project.io https://luigi-project.io.
- rezonant 3y agoThat's iframes. There is an older, even more archaic spell that lets you do iframes, but not inline. Those are, as we all know, superior.
- susam 3y agoYes! Those were made with the now obsolete <frameset> tag. An example here: https://www.quackit.com/html/html_4/tags/html_frameset_tag.cfm https://www.quackit.com/html/html_4/tags/html_frameset_tag.c... In fact, I used them too around 2001 or so for my website when I did not enough programming/scripting to add a common layout to all content pages. That's how I originally implemented a two column layout: a narrow frame on the left for navigation links and a wide one on the right for content. I don't do it anymore, of course. I do know how to program now and generate my HTML website using a tiny Common Lisp program that adds common headers and footers to all my web pages.
- rezonant 3y agoWe've come so far. Using a language from the 60s to write markup in a language from the 90s all so we can feel good by avoiding writing imperative code in another language from the 90s. Seriously though, why can HTML not have a client side include?
- colanderman 3y agoYou can do client-side include with XSLT, which (surprisingly!) all major browsers support.
- 3y ago
- DecoySalamander 3y agoThere has also been the reverse problem of someone embedding your entire site in their frames to place ads on top of your content.
- joquarky 3y agoWe called those "para sites"
- jon-wood 3y agoThe real pros used server side includes, where you could drop specially formed comments into your HTML which then be processed by Apache and replaced with the content of another file before being sent on to the client.
- donatj 3y agoFrames lead me to IIS SSI’s which lead me to PHP 3 which kicked off my entire career.
- jon-wood 3y agoLikewise, I think its under appreciated just how many people got their start in this industry through tinkering with things because they seemed interesting.
- DoodahMan 3y agoi got my start with a copy of Gorillas - a QBasic game - when i was maybe 7 or 8. to play it you had to open the code and execute it. one day i got curious what all of the gibberish text meant, and that was the start of my journey: a damn game of gorillas throwing bananas! now here i am.. 30+ years later and eternally grateful for those pixelated primates. i sometimes wonder what drove me to tinker with that code that day.
- tracker1 3y agoLoL... I used 1px frames to post to for sending data to/from the server.. window.top.callbacks[number]("serializedData™) In the latter 90s. Would also client render navigation frames at the time. Wicked fast compared to most web apps at the time.
- wharvle 3y agoA comically large proportion of “AJAX”-type use of JavaScript could just be frames and probably perform better, if frames had evolved a bit rather than remaining stagnant. Fix that and give us HTML tables with basic features built-in and datasource-backed tables + list views back in the mid ‘00s and mind-boggling amounts of time and money could have been saved. Instead, none of that happened, and it still hasn’t. Don’t even get me started on how much money could have been saved if the Web had adopted payment standards so that the browser itself could handle payment input.
- brnt 3y ago216 web safe colors anyone?
- bdcravens 3y agoDon't forget hidden frames/iframes used to move data around before AJAX.