I remember using images that looked almost identical to <HR> in place of an actual <HR> tag. Plus the million variations (you didn't have a real site until you

I remember using images that looked almost identical to <HR> in place of an actual <HR> tag. Plus the million variations (you didn't have a real site until you have a <HR> image that matched your theme). I remember the 1x1 transparent pixel with great affection---it was the output of my first significant CGI script (in Perl, of course) that I used as a site counter. Winsock! Fuck yeah! I remember when a web page and a gopher site looked almost identical (yes, gopher was quite cool for awhile). The Table vs CSS wars never ended and are just in a temporary cease fire. I started my own webring. And ring of rings. And proudly displayed my "made with notepad" button. And the black one with the red ribbon for... 2600? or EFF? The most popular websites were vast collections of poorly transcribed midi collections that took years to master as every fucktard in middle school band uploaded a slightly different version of every song on earth. Twice, if it was Stairway to Heaven. I was a webmaster. Everyone bitched about SSI and its security holes but everyone used it anyway because fuck you, inline or die! Except it was universally only used for image counters and random quote generators. My local ISP gave everyone a shell, email, ftp, and web account. You just had to figure out SLIP and PPP. State of the art at one point was dialing into a local BBS to access their internet connection so you could use lynx to pull up the first sites. Animated GIFs will survive cockroaches. Frontpage when it first came out was a horrible POS. It would randomly move half your links, reformat them, rearrange your files, and change your background to bright red. Just, well, who the fuck knows why. TABLES WITH 3D BORDER SUPPORT. FUCK YEAH. IT'S NOT A 3D BUTTON UNTIL IT'S IN ITS OWN 3D TABLE FOR EMPHASIS. ------------ Even though browsers have all kinds of compatibility issues now, they are mostly minor. There were several years where IE would say "we're just going to put in our own marquee tab, why the fuck not?" then Netscape would say "We're all going to VRML. Oh and you can set the background color" and IE would say "Shit, we're just going to put a TV in here. You want a TV? Use IE." and Netscape would say "Fucking A, our new <cat> tag actually purrs. Does IE have <cat> support? NO! (because we just invented it)" and Netscape would say "DUDE. LLLLLAAAAYYYYERRRZZZZZZ AND SHIT" and IE would say "FUCK IT WE'LL JUST PUT A WHOLE OTHER BROWSER FRAME IN YOUR BROWSER FRAME." It really was quite a crazy and extremely blatant war over the future. IE won when it's "waiting" icon because a large spinning globe and a million VB ActiveX developers were unleashed upon the world. That was just the jihad, though. The battle was actually won when Gates just stonewalled the shit out of the courts for 4 years, causing Netscape to slowly lose their mind until they became convinced that rewriting their entire fucking code base was the way forward.