HTML hacks that shaped the Internet (tedium.co)

Same story with rounded corners, which were originally accomplished with tables and images. And a lot of the conventions for website navigation were established in table-based layouts

I guess that would be just called "history of the internet". Originally designed to display text with links - and after decades of hacks, a browser is now allmost an OS, capable of allmost anything computer related.

We were using that XMLHTTP object as far back as 1999 (I just went to look at old source code) to load page fragments do quasi-SPA stuff before it was a thing.

It's not really possible to separate that from functionality.

Your point about the potential rigidity of standards is well taken. However, it’s important to note that a standard, by its nature, doesn’t necessarily have to be rigid and inflexible in a way that hinders progress or creativity. Standards can be designed with adaptability in mind, providing a stable foundation while still allowing for innovation and flexibility. This balanced approach ensures that standards serve as helpful guidelines, not as constraints that stifle growth or possibilities.

Your final point about the practical realities where standards rubber meets the road, so to speak, is also a good one. But there's a distinction between the type of standards you might be referring to, such as in manufacturing or quality assurance, and web. In the former, standards indeed can produce this kind of regulatory capture or bloated compliance industry, and associated restriction on innovation and competition. And on the other hand, the type of standards that we mean when we talk about the web, even though it's the same word, I think they're very distinct in fundamental ways.

Although they share the same terminology, web standards tend to be more about enabling interoperability, innovation, and accessibility, rather than imposing restrictive regulations. However, restrictions do occur and they are sometimes abused, seemingly by big vendors to enhance their value capture by penalizing alternatives in the name of “user safety”. In that sense, web standards can share the “corruption of standards” which I think is invoked by your last point.

  with open(filename) as my_file:
      data = my_file.read()

  lock = threading.Lock()
  with lock:
      pass # do stuff

  var values = [];
  for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
    values.push(function() { console.log(i); });
  }
  for (var j = 0; j < 3; j++) {
    values[j]();
  }

  for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
    (function(i) {
      values.push(function() { console.log(i); });
    })(i);
  }

  for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
    with ({i: i}) {
      values.push(function() { console.log(i); });
    }
  }

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a#...

Note: If you think web browsers are weird, just wait until you try doing things in email clients or - $deity forbid - ebook readers.

As you say, it was weird and initially quite difficult to wrap my head around it. Surprisingly, I didn't actually learn about the "clearfix" hack until a couple of years later when I interviewed for a Front-End job at - of all places - Fox News.

The person who I talked with there gave me a take-home to work on and send back. Tl;dr I didn't get it quite right because I hadn't really taken the time to understand what the particular styles did to the layout.

Fast-forward to today and I'm using floats w/ @print and a div class of "clearfix" set to "both" in order to reset the layout of a document that was converted from Word's .docx to HTML.

How times change.

I met your children -- what did you tell them?

Fell out of use because "nobody uses IE for Mac" :)

Madness!

Generally speaking, if I see an HTML e-mail I know the other end cares NOTHING about security or efficiency, and is actively trying to snoop on me with analytics.

Not surprising you had to fall back to very old HTML to hit a common featureset.

I was not really interested if those doing a "View Source" are going to be offended by my "incorrect" use of tables.

It never works like I want it to, and I never know if it's because I'm dumb or the tool is poorly-designed, and by then I've wasted two hours, so I always end up just going back to tables because they freaking work.

The good news is now flexbox and grid work in all modern browsers, so this is (finally) a solved problem

The only issue with floats was that there were a lot of edge cases that happened in only certain browsers, so you had to be careful. Lots of browser bugs.

Job security.