HN Explorer

36 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 88.6 ms ] thread
Tepix
Neat. However, with today's 4K screens, 88x31 is really tiny...
filcuk
That's completely irrelevant?
Cthulhu_
I wouldn't be using native resolution on a 4K screen myself, everything gets too small then.
avian
I was wondering where the odd 88x31 size came from. According to this [1] it's basically because at one point GeoCities used a GIF of this size and then everyone copied it.

[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/140100/why-has-8831-b...

jagermo
interesting, so basically a standard by simply everyone using it, like the #. Cool.
rchaud
Keeping them at a uniform size probably helped them stack evenly when displayed in an HTML table. Back in the day, these GIFs served as site badges or favicons, which weren't created until 1999.
card_zero
Seeing all these load immediately, and none of them stall, and then they all animate simultaneously and the browser doesn't crash ... feels really weird.
ramon156
Funny, on the in-app browser of Harmonic it still goes on-by-one. Firefox on mobile also instantly loads.

More nostalgia I suppose!

jFriedensreich
The joke is on me because i still see them load in slowly about 10 at a time.
Cthulhu_
It's still HTTP 1.1, it's got 5 or so requests at a time but many short iterative download bursts. Since the server seems to use nginx and already uses https, upgrading to HTTP 2 or 3 shouldn't be a big issue.
drbig
The visual cacophony! The silent scream!

A truly marvelous collection.

patates
There are some which may be NSFW. Just FYI.

I'll wait until I switch to my private computer to dive into it more :)

jFriedensreich
One phrase caught my attention saying "No frames now!" in a few variations. Were frames a disputed feature at one time?
rendx
Aren't they still, or rather, almost completely dead and gone?
hatsuseno
I wouldn't say dead and gone, tabular data is still a thing.
tiagod
Still used to embed YouTube videos in a page, for example.
pjc50
Iframes are not <frameset>. Frameset really is dead now you can have CSS fixed left and top headers.
theshrike79
Frames were used because server side rendering of partial pages was sometimes a massive pain. There was no fancy React DOM that could refresh just the relevant bits.

In these cases you just added a frame and you could click through content and the navigation would stay in place.

...but then, like always, people went overboard and pages started to have 42 frames within frames within frames and it made everything painful.

2mlWQbCK
Even when reasonably sensibly used the result was a page where you could not bookmark sub-pages (important at the time, when everyone was still using bookmarks!).

This forum thread from 25 years ago that came up near the top when I searched for frame hate was a fun window into a different time with many expressing just why and how much they hated frames:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-people-hate-htm...

Happily surprised to see that the page linked towards the end of the thread, last modified in 1997, is still online: https://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html

teddyh
IIRC, frames was originally a proprietary Netscape-only feature, at a time when the Netscape browser was proprietary, commercial, and did not support many platforms, and many people therefore used other browsers and/or other platforms which did not support frames.
forgotmypw17
As another comment mentioned, frames were originally a proprietary Netscape feature and required special attention to make accessible to any other browser (using the noframes tag and providing links to the framed content, for example). Otherwise, users would just see an empty page (or, worse, a “best viewed with Netscape” message.)

Before IE, there were at least two smaller browser “skirmishes”, and this was one of them. One before it was with Mosaic and inline image support, which most browsers did not have at the time (only links to view/download.)

p0w3n3d
Looks like www.milliondollarhomepage.com
yapyap
ah man, them loading in was satisfying!
myfonj
For crisp and quadrupled device pixels there, F12 console and:

    with( document.documentElement.style ){
      transformOrigin = '0 0';
      imageRendering = 'pixelated';
      scale = 1 / devicePixelRatio * 4;
    }
jihadjihad
Seeing all the Macromedia ones (“Made with Macromedia Dreamweaver”) right next to the Adobe ones is probably intentional, but still a little jarring even all these years later.

I cut my teeth building sites with Dreamweaver back in the day and still am sore about Adobe letting it wither on the vine after the acquisition.

acheron
What were the ones that were narrower that usually said things like “Apache” or “XHTML” or something technical?

Ah here, 80x15 badges: https://web.badges.world

I think those were popular a bit later than the 88x31 ones.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)