Well, I got a girlfriend just because of that. My personal blog was kinda popular in those days. A girl once commented/emailed (forgot) something in the lines of -- You gotta be kidding, the counters is fake and scripted, right? It is increasing every second or so. You cannot have so many visitors!
Those were the times of the high hundred-thousands visits to my site if not millions each month.
I told her to meet me and look at the analytics. I show her the stuffs and she became my girlfriend. ;-)
Between flash and html5, there was a brief moment where DHTML games looked viable. I remember building something like a space invaders clone. Literally repositioning DOM divs each setInterval tick. There were a few full fledged experiments out there. The beauty is since its just DOM, they are playable forever if still hosted ;)
What could you do in Flash that cannot be done now in JS/CSS?
I don't understand this love for Flash that won't die. Yes, it did something usable well before JS/CSS caught up, but we're there now and well past what Flash brought us. Mainly, now things freakin searchable, and you no longer have to live in fear of what the next major vuln exposed by Flash would do to you.
Where are the browser games built with Html5 to compare with the Cambrian explosion of Flash games that everyone and their brother made circa 2000-2010?
Like all things, it's been made more difficult and the authoring tools are worse.
The developer experience is just subpar. I believe this is a big factor why there's far less amateur content today. In terms of multimedia, I was able to do more with my 512MB Windows XP on rust-prone spinning disks and Flash 8 than my 32GB SSD-based Ubuntu LTS. The former was also programmed by a highschool student; the latter, same highschool student but with a CS degree and almost a decade of industry experience.
Back then, I could rapidly prototype a small Flash project, maybe 10 scenes (is that the term then?). Today, yeah it's easy to get started but you have a project that's bit more than 3 scenes and you need to use webpack if you want any hope of keeping things organized.
Distribution-wise, Flash packaging is just superior. You can even make it an .exe to share with your friends (security be damned; that's what I did then). To distribute your HTML5 project you basically need a webserver and send your link around and hope they open it in a compatible browser (if they use a Mac with Safari, you better hope you didn't use too much cutting edge APIs). I guess today you could also use Electron, equivalent to me exporting to exe, but that's another battery that's sold separately.
Plus, animation is just loads better with a WYSIWYG editor like Flash. HTML5 is powerful but anything more than a simple motion tween and I have to pull up a pen and paper to calculate an object's movements. Though admittedly I've never looked into a visual editor for HTML5, that's if one even exists.
(Of course, something has to be said about the price too. HTML5 is basically costless. Flash...let's just say I rode on my school's license back then.)
Definitely was interesting, and fun times for sure.
Microsoft with ASP, ActiveX and VBScript in pages. I also remember writing ISAPI extensions for IIS to handle searching backend systems. IIRC e-bay was the best known company that had an ISAPI extension at one point. I worked at a smaller company where we did it cause our systems were disconnected and we had to search custom databases.
Macromedia with dreamweaver & Flash & shockwave at one point (think that was a little later).
Java applets, ugh.
Splash pages, visitor counters.
ODBC, ADO, OLE DB... Connecting to databases was always about finding the right driver for your OS and DB version which depending on OS & DB could be a challenge.
Browser targeting was a major pain, splash/home pages telling you to only use IE or Netscape etc.
As a prolific user of nbsp; for aligning/indentation/spacing, I feel like millions of man years could have been saved by just deeming that acceptable than by trying to find the right voodoo mix of padding/margin/box-model yada yada that we ended up with.
I was so happy to no longer need frames. Modern CSS with grid and flex have made <frame> feel like a horrible nightmare that I just can't quite shake. One that makes you turn on the lights in every room.
The second “website” I built was a GTA fan site in about 1998-99 (I was about 13), I had just discovered frames and decided they were brilliant. The layout was a header, left side nav, main content and footer - all frames. But the look I was going for had a black ~4px border around each frame. Rather than do this with tables inside the frames I created a ‘black.html’ page with a back background and added it I think about 10 times to the frameset to create the borders. It’s was in my mind at the time beautiful.
My contrarian take for the day: I liked frames. It was a nice built-in way to provide consistent site-level navigation and context when your styling options were otherwise pretty limited. The only problem was when it broke navigation outside the site, which was a pretty bad design decision and took a lot of self-discipline to prevent.
I'm on the fence about frames. From one side, it annoyingly broke navigation, opening in new tab, etc. But on the other hand it allowed to open just the content itself without navigation elements, allowing for eg. easy printing.
(and navigation could be fixed by browsers, maybe by encoding currently active frame targets into url after #)
Spacer GIFs which are resized for narrow screens (300-750px) using CSS depending on the tag's width attribute. That's not a technique I've seen before:
Because it's not really reliable and breaks in many situations. reddits old nested divs work much better in contrast, and have a layout that matches the semantic situation better.
Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>.
I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.
My memory at this point is faded, but I thought that was the point? You used both of them to cover both the Netscape and IE cases.
(Hence, the joke, that to combine the two made you a Great Web Developer, since you knew about such things. The bar was rather low in those days, to be honest.)
I don't think so. <marquee> and <blink> do different things. <marquee> makes its content scroll across the page. <blink> makes it's content turn invisible and then reappear about once per second.
Am I the only one who found the term DHTML to be one of the most useless initialisms that came from web development?
I remember seeing "DHTML" still being thrown around as late as 2005, but knowing that I could refer to the components of a webpage as "DHTML" never seemed to have any sort of utility. I never cared that I could refer to the markup as being dynamic. Big deal. What scripts and applets could I add to make things move?
Of course now we're still stuck with this "HTML5" canard that won't die because nontechnical people seem to believe it's more advanced than "HTML".
Yeah, I clicked over to see if this was a joke or a mistake. I'm still honestly not sure.
It was definitely "Dynamic HTML". Just a few weeks ago, I threw out a bunch of old issues of MacWorld... one of them had a cover article on the then-new technology of DHTML.
That reminds me of the time someone told me they were building web pages in HotMail. I was like, “WTF?” And then he spelled out HotMail for me, “HTML, HotMail”. I was like, “oh”.
Don't worry, some of us still are using those tricks, especially nbsp and blank pixel. Why? Well, I'm doing backend/infra stuff most of my time, so I have no idea what is current or bleeding edge in frontend space these days. When someone starts screaming that page/app is looking broken and fronted devs are sleeping in different timezones, a couple of nbsp-s usually fix the problem. Happy customer, happy me :)
My memory is hazy, I was reading and thinking surely some of these ( DHTML ) are crossing into early 00s? And then I read
> In other words, which editor (FrontPage ‘98, obviously), which web server (GeoCities, you moron),
Oh yes. FrontPage 98!
> I miss the good ol’ days. "Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of JavaScript", of all things. Shit doesn’t even know how to calculate math correctly. It’s amazing we ever got to where we are today, when you think about it.
Couldn't agree more. And not just on the Web, it is abstraction on top of abstraction in everything, from Tech to everything in general.
Usually those right click protections just popped up an alert on mouse down, so you could skip them by keeping RMB down as you left click them away.. after which the context menu would appear anyway.
You could also use the “context menu” key that many keyboards had next to the windows key. Because it wasn’t a mouse click, you’d get the right click menu open that way.
Memories! :-) I was a web developer in the 2000s and I can relate to all of these very accurately… Replace Frontpage 98 by Frontpage 2003 and there you go!
I started my true web development arc in 1999 and used most of these techniques. There was a netizen of the time called “Dr Ozone” who was doing mind bending stuff on his site at the time. It’s still around at https://ozones.com/ it’s where I learned what JavaScript could do. The number of hacks used to deal with the DOM models until jquery was epic.
Not just using images for rounded corners, but drop-shadow effects too. Of course, that required 8 or so different gifs to cover all four sides of a container, including separate images for the corners.
> The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links.
I don't know how this trend came to be. I fought it for as long as I could, links are underlined and when you hovered them the underline would go away to make it extra clear this is an interactive element. I considered it a staple of good design. Why did we remove the underline?
Sarcastic or not, I really, really hate flat buttons. This is one area where I feel skeumorphic design works. Make it apparent I can push it. Today everything looks like a label, and good luck figuring out if it's active or not.
I do web dev and I swear I have a better understanding of UX and design than 90% of the "web designers" I've worked with. I can't make pretty pictures, but I know an ugly experience when I'm building it ;)
Most sites invert that effect: hovering reveals the underline. The link is still distinguishable by color, still apparently interactive by hover effect, and preserves underlining as a styling option in the text, which is preferable.
That and the different colour for "visited" links. This site is a good example where a different colour for a link you've clicked would be really useful - but it's strangely lacking. Every time I click a link on HN to read an article, and come back to HN to read the comments discussing said article, I have to scan the whole HN page again to find the link. It's frustrating.
This is why the tech industry only having a memory of about five years makes me sad. You learn the tricks to get the job done, the next generation comes along and mocks you for being outdated, not understanding that they build on the shoulders of what came before them.
Wow. That took me back. All those things, every day. And table layouts of course. And let's not forget slicing images, and slapping those into tables too. If I remember rightly, Photoshop had an "export to slices" thing built in. Amazing. Loved it.
And of course one of the biggest issues with today's web: you can't just view source and copy paste. You're in the land of chasing back up CSS files, js libraries, or finding yourself unable to steal an image because it's not just an image you can right click on any more.
My highschool computer curriculum was basically a hacker school program for web dev stretched across three years (senior year we did VB6). I managed to be impressive because I would dissect web pages to learn their tricks. I think I must be the only one (or if not, at least among the first) in our level to pull off columned layout without CSS. I figured out <table border="0"></table> all by myself, neither the books nor the teachers taught you that. And I did that by reading source code on IE5---developer tools weren't a thing then!
In our second year, one of the exercises was to recreate Yahoo's log-in page. I got closest exactly because of the above. I still feel smug remembering this.
I was always jealous of schools that would teach some sort of programming or web design. My high school computer class (each year) was learning how to use MS Office. Which was probably the most useful instruction the rest of those kids could have received... but I wanted to learn to program.
So, the computer class instructor sat me down and asked me what I knew about programming. "I can use Perl", I said (I had read Perl For Dummies, v5.00502 edition). So he told me to make an online calendar for the school. So, I did. No instruction... just figured it out as I went. And that's how I learned that managing and displaying events in arbitrary times and dates is harder than P=NP.
Turns out that giving me that project was intended to save the school from having to pay for a real online calendar.
There's browser extensions that will convert a whole page as it is loaded in the browser to an image file. For ever-scrolling pages you have to manually stop it.
Thanks to this post and internet archive's wayback machine I just had a trip back to the end of the 90s to some of the web pages I wrote these days for a local PR agency. I was surprised to see that they still render reasonably well on my smart phone. Nice dose of nostalgia
I used to build entire sites in photoshop. It produced horrendous mark-up, but streamlined the whole design process, and allowed for really beautiful graphic designs. Haven't done web development in well over a decade, but I assume from your comment this is no longer a thing?
They have missed out Perl CGI scripts from “Matts Script Archive”[0]!
I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes).
Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms!
Edit: wow cgi proxy has been updated as recently at 2019! [1]
Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game, right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded UltimateBB.
Around the time the word 'blog' was being coined, I did terrible things to the guestbook CGI script from Matt's Script Archive in order to make it easy for a small staff of writers to update a news site I had started about Nine Inch Nails. I later migrated to a Perl Script called 'News Publisher' by someone named Grant Williams - it's basically a static site generator that runs on Perl and flatfiles. Around 2008, I ported the whole thing to C# & SQL Server, but in the process, refactored and cleaned up the Perl code, and figured - why bother with the big underlying shift? So it's still what powers that NIN website two decades later.
CGIProxy was the start of a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between the IT staff and a group of students at my school. It started with finding public hosts ("inurl:nph-proxy.cgi"), and quickly evolved to self-hosting CGIProxy on custom domains/ports. Portable Firefox could be used to sidestep some of the filtering software, until they started auto-closing any window with "Firefox" in the title and .exes called firefox.exe (both of which could also be worked around). It culminated in them creating their own domain admin account so they could disable most of the blocking/monitoring software (the main domain admin's account password being "school" made this _much_ easier than it should have been).
They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "<surname>'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.
Matt's Script Archive is still live. God alone knows why, but it is. You can still download wwwboard (even though FF warns about an insecure connection), it was last updated in 2002.
... and if you search "wwwboard" apparently you can still find some in the wild.
354 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadRemember those, we'd put the message "just a counter, don't click" beneath them.
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history
> <IMG SRC="/cgi/webcounter.cgi">
Those were the times of the high hundred-thousands visits to my site if not millions each month.
I told her to meet me and look at the analytics. I show her the stuffs and she became my girlfriend. ;-)
I don't understand this love for Flash that won't die. Yes, it did something usable well before JS/CSS caught up, but we're there now and well past what Flash brought us. Mainly, now things freakin searchable, and you no longer have to live in fear of what the next major vuln exposed by Flash would do to you.
Like all things, it's been made more difficult and the authoring tools are worse.
I'd say they're all on mobile making money through IAPs vs some freely distributed game on a website.
> it's been made more difficult and the authoring tools are worse.
With the prolific amount of titles on mobile, I'd say they found the better platform to build on.
However, you never answered the question as asked. Whataboutism runs amuck. What could you do in Flash that cannot be done in modern JS/CSS today?
Back then, I could rapidly prototype a small Flash project, maybe 10 scenes (is that the term then?). Today, yeah it's easy to get started but you have a project that's bit more than 3 scenes and you need to use webpack if you want any hope of keeping things organized.
Distribution-wise, Flash packaging is just superior. You can even make it an .exe to share with your friends (security be damned; that's what I did then). To distribute your HTML5 project you basically need a webserver and send your link around and hope they open it in a compatible browser (if they use a Mac with Safari, you better hope you didn't use too much cutting edge APIs). I guess today you could also use Electron, equivalent to me exporting to exe, but that's another battery that's sold separately.
Plus, animation is just loads better with a WYSIWYG editor like Flash. HTML5 is powerful but anything more than a simple motion tween and I have to pull up a pen and paper to calculate an object's movements. Though admittedly I've never looked into a visual editor for HTML5, that's if one even exists.
(Of course, something has to be said about the price too. HTML5 is basically costless. Flash...let's just say I rode on my school's license back then.)
Microsoft with ASP, ActiveX and VBScript in pages. I also remember writing ISAPI extensions for IIS to handle searching backend systems. IIRC e-bay was the best known company that had an ISAPI extension at one point. I worked at a smaller company where we did it cause our systems were disconnected and we had to search custom databases.
Macromedia with dreamweaver & Flash & shockwave at one point (think that was a little later).
Java applets, ugh.
Splash pages, visitor counters.
ODBC, ADO, OLE DB... Connecting to databases was always about finding the right driver for your OS and DB version which depending on OS & DB could be a challenge.
Browser targeting was a major pain, splash/home pages telling you to only use IE or Netscape etc.
this probably started in 1997-or 1998 or so, and probably had its apex in the mid 2000s especially with the hegemony of IE5.
What an amazing time. Felt like the wild west back then.
http://budugllydesign.com/frame9806/hateframe.html
It’s archived on archive.org - I forget the url….
(and navigation could be fixed by browsers, maybe by encoding currently active frame targets into url after #)
> img[src='s.gif'][width='40'] {width: 12px;}
(from https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css)
Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>.
I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.
(Hence, the joke, that to combine the two made you a Great Web Developer, since you knew about such things. The bar was rather low in those days, to be honest.)
ArcadeNFT is an example of a project that utilizes this: https://opensea.io/assets/0xa0c38108bbb0f5f2fb46a2019d7314cc...
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
I remember seeing "DHTML" still being thrown around as late as 2005, but knowing that I could refer to the components of a webpage as "DHTML" never seemed to have any sort of utility. I never cared that I could refer to the markup as being dynamic. Big deal. What scripts and applets could I add to make things move?
Of course now we're still stuck with this "HTML5" canard that won't die because nontechnical people seem to believe it's more advanced than "HTML".
It was definitely "Dynamic HTML". Just a few weeks ago, I threw out a bunch of old issues of MacWorld... one of them had a cover article on the then-new technology of DHTML.
Btw. isn't DHTML for "Dynamic HTML"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML
It is. I thought he was making a joke ( or a Jab ) with everything in modern dev being "distributed". May be I read him wrong.
> In other words, which editor (FrontPage ‘98, obviously), which web server (GeoCities, you moron),
Oh yes. FrontPage 98!
> I miss the good ol’ days. "Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of JavaScript", of all things. Shit doesn’t even know how to calculate math correctly. It’s amazing we ever got to where we are today, when you think about it.
Couldn't agree more. And not just on the Web, it is abstraction on top of abstraction in everything, from Tech to everything in general.
Oh God and MS Visual Source Safe.
I remember when Aldus and Macromind merged.
I can't believe Adobe was allowed to merge with Macromedia.
Very satisfying when you can bypass such useless "protections"
everything I learned about javascript, I learned from gamelan: https://web.archive.org/web/19961022194345/http://www.gamela...
It's funny how many neural network demos there are. I almost forgot that was one of the prior "AI" waves before the previous AI crash.
- searching for random Perl scripts to FTP into your cgi-bin folder
from one 90's web developer to another:
https://htmx.org
<blink>hypermedia 4eva</blink>
I don't know how this trend came to be. I fought it for as long as I could, links are underlined and when you hovered them the underline would go away to make it extra clear this is an interactive element. I considered it a staple of good design. Why did we remove the underline?
Or pick a 90's trope: Ironic detachment? Only things that are obscure are cool?
Traditional print designers started doing web design without investing the time to understand the important differences in the (new) paradigm.
Sadly, that root problem too often persists to today.
And of course one of the biggest issues with today's web: you can't just view source and copy paste. You're in the land of chasing back up CSS files, js libraries, or finding yourself unable to steal an image because it's not just an image you can right click on any more.
Golden times.
My highschool computer curriculum was basically a hacker school program for web dev stretched across three years (senior year we did VB6). I managed to be impressive because I would dissect web pages to learn their tricks. I think I must be the only one (or if not, at least among the first) in our level to pull off columned layout without CSS. I figured out <table border="0"></table> all by myself, neither the books nor the teachers taught you that. And I did that by reading source code on IE5---developer tools weren't a thing then!
In our second year, one of the exercises was to recreate Yahoo's log-in page. I got closest exactly because of the above. I still feel smug remembering this.
Golden times, indeed. :)
So, the computer class instructor sat me down and asked me what I knew about programming. "I can use Perl", I said (I had read Perl For Dummies, v5.00502 edition). So he told me to make an online calendar for the school. So, I did. No instruction... just figured it out as I went. And that's how I learned that managing and displaying events in arbitrary times and dates is harder than P=NP.
Turns out that giving me that project was intended to save the school from having to pay for a real online calendar.
There's browser extensions that will convert a whole page as it is loaded in the browser to an image file. For ever-scrolling pages you have to manually stop it.
So long as your browser window was the same resolution as the designers.
Maybe shit like webassembly will change that, but for now, steal away.
Guilty
>
Guilty (habitual offender)
I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes).
Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms!
Edit: wow cgi proxy has been updated as recently at 2019! [1]
0: https://web.archive.org/web/19980709151514/http://scriptarch...
1: https://jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game, right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded UltimateBB.
They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "<surname>'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.
... and if you search "wwwboard" apparently you can still find some in the wild.