When I was a kid (well, a less decrepit and slightly less old man) and there was no calc(), we did that sort of thing with padding-left, float, and negative margin-left.
And the <hr> tag. And I remember I made a Java applet that consumed so many resources that everyone who visited my page thought their machine had locked up. Good times.
Not necessarily. A horizontal rule (or flourish) is often used in fiction as a context-shift indicator within a chapter. Technical documents are not the only documents.
Borders and white space. Funny how much of modern clean design aesthetic was already possible to do with basic HTML back in the day but we were too fascinated with blinky flashy colorful tags to ask ourselves "Doesn't this altogether look like neon hell?"
We had to design websites in high school, circa 7-8 years ago. Pretty sure if anyone had implemented a flat desing they would have been given a D for poor effort.
It's all about that terrible blue button in Dreamweaver that animated concentric circles when you hovered over it..
Heh. I wrote a JavaScript DHTML demo in 1999 that I locked to a browser window sized 640x480px because otherwise it made PCs grind to a halt and crashed Macs. Nowadays it runs on my phone just fine... Link for anyone who's interested: http://www.gilesthomas.com/old-javascript/stars/index.html
Ironically, this is what I put together in 2009 (ten years after the DHTML demo) and it also crashed browsers then, and it also runs on my phone now: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217
I remember a friend would troll me by obscuring a url which led to this website that hosted an image with a ridiculously large resolution for computer hardware of the time to render, resulting in a BSOD within 10 seconds. Got me every time!
this was still a problem until very recently. A few years ago I linked a 50k by 50k image in an IRC channel, 2 people experienced an X crash and one had a kernel panic.
ns4 = (document.layers)? true:false
ie4 = (document.all)? true:false
if (ns4||ie4) document.writeln('<DIV ID="bulge"><IMG SRC="bulge.gif" WIDTH=49 HEIGHT=148 BORDER=0></DIV>')
else alert("You must have Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0\nto view the examples in this site.")
I remember using layers. I was in primary school at the time.
Hey, there's another one for the list: only '90s web developers know what it's like to have to learn new technologies by going to Barnes & Noble and buying a book about them.
Really? I learned about NCSA httpd from the online documentation at hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu and talking to one of the authors. Granted, I was at UIUC at the time, and knew some of the Mosaic developers as well. ;)
Part of me wants to build a bonfire and toss it on. The other part of me goes, "But that's a book. A completely useless except as a curiosity for historians book, but still a book."
Buy books?! who the hell does that. No, you would go to Barnes and Noble, or Borders, find a nice comfy chair and read until your eyes bled. You justified it by reminding yourself that the book was already obsolete from the moment it was printed so you didn't need to buy it, anyway.
OMG... Dynamic Drive was pretty much my go to JavaScript hack site. Oh the frustration when taking two little snippets and finding out they were not compatible with each other. And then the elation when you managed to rewrite them to make them work together.
EDIT: Holy crap... I still have the bookmark for DD (and JavaScript Kit at the old http://www.wsabstract.com domain) in an "Imported" bookmarks folder in Chrome. I'm not sure how many browsers those have been through over the years.
It was a joke related to everyone falling over themselves now for distributed anything in the way that everyone fell themselves for anything dynamic back in the day.
> Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation. By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer.
Except that blink only existed in Netscape and marquee only existed in IE, and you could not have a webpage with both before around 2004, when firefox got support for marquee. At that point both tags were almost universally despised.
That is all Photoshop was used for back in the day.
Noise filter, sheer, blur, fuck with the levels, colorize with a horribly bright shade of something. If you fucked it up bad enough you couldn't tell it wasn't repeating. 90x90 and 120x120 all the way down.
That and making an amazing image with a completely pointless sun glare filter and then cutting the image into cubes so you could display it on the site. Thats how "consultants" overcame HTML limitations for a long ass time.
> HTML For Dummies doesn't cover the <IMG> tag until chapter four?
Ah yes, HTML For Dummies. For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my elementary school Pokemon craze led me to create my first serious website from scratch, Mew's Hidden Lair [1]. Except back then it was Dummies 101: HTML [2]. And I do remember how magical it was to type in that command and see an image of Pikachu show up on my screen.
Reading the article and writing this post has been a serious trip down memory lane. Great, now I'm nostalgic. Back to work I guess...
Uh, are you me? My HTML book was a different one, but I definitely had the pokemon[1] thing. All in elementary school. Who knew it would end up being my career?
I very well could be, considering one of my first experiments was on maxpages also, but I can't remember the name unfortunately (pikachu something?). I remember how ultra-competitive it was to get people to upvote your website so it would get to the maxpages front page and that at one point all the front page links were pokemon websites.
I wonder if there's a safe way an insider from maxpages, coolfreewhatever, trident, geocities, etc. could provide this data maybe by email address without violating the privacy of everyone ever? I have the exact same story, including the hilarious pokemon websites from 2000-2003. Can't remember any of the urls. I don't need backups, just the urls.
1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.
I feel old now.. in 1998, I was 24 and had been working as a web developer for a couple of years. I'd moved on from any thoughts of Netscape server-side dev, and was doing VBScript and JScript in classic ASP. JS was my favorite language back then, though dealing with MS COM collections was a pain.
I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.
What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.
I think one reason for me, is that I am way much better doing pure graphics coding for customs components, than trying to make a component out of <div/> coupled with CSS/JavaScript magic.
God, I started out with Perl-based CGI, NetObjects Fusion, and ATG Dynamo's early JSP implementation, back when being able to afford a SQL backend meant you were hot stuff. Kids today have it so easy. We had to code ISAPI filters, during packet storms, for bidirectional communication! And don't get me started on what we had to do when the bit buckets ran out of ones....
I wrote an Atari 2600 cartridge auction/trading site in perl that was so popular, it caused my company's webserver - a large national ISP! - to slow to a crawl running all the CGI.
This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.
I can't happen but notice the "village" button on the bottom on your site. I used to write "news" for that site. I still talk to the original owner of that site today.
I am so, so, so sad that Yahoo! shut down Geocities, because they took with them the Pokemon fan website that I made when I was just learning this whole 'HTML' thing for the first time.
I even remember the exact full URL of the website[0]. But between the demise of Geocities and the demise of my 386's hard drive, that piece of nostalgia is gone forever.
I remember dedicating a page to all of the different "strategies" to catch Mew in Gen I games, before we all collectively decided that this was impossible to do without a Gameshark[1]. Little did we know that there was a technique - it just wouldn't be discovered until ~2003[2]]!
[0] For those just tuning in this century, Geocities would provide webspace (that's a word I haven't used in a while!) and your homepage would be a URL of the format http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234
[1] "When I was your age, Action Replay was a Gameshark..."
Has everyone made a Pokemon site as part of some rite of passage or something? One of the first things I did to teach myself Perl and HTML back in the day was write a Pokedex page.
I made a school website instead. It got official and to thank me for the good deed they removed our class from the school history when they build the new website and converted the image archive, because we weren't up to their standard or whatever.
Catholics .. gotta love them.
I still remember sitting there hours and days banging my head on the table how to get this school logo exactly in the center at the top of the page where it had to stay visible even if the page was scrolled, because "it has to be up there. And it must be always visible."
Fun times.
That's awesome! I remember most pages looked like that back in the day actually. I even offered it as a 'service' to Dragonball Z websites. It existed of just a background image with all the borders/effects in it, and transparent tables on top of it with a content structure just like yours. Good times.
The file was huge, about several hundred gigabyte. I didn't download it, because I don't have enough space and downloading it would take ages with my slow connection.
On http://reocities.com/ you can browse through some of the old pages and sites, but many things are broken now, missing images.
Geocities was awesome. I used it for an upcoming events website while I was in school. I remember thinking how cool it was when I bought a domain name for the site. When good ol' Geocities went away, it was really sad. Kind of felt like the end of an era.
Luckily the title of babies first scripts as well as annoying autoplay, flashing gifs and terrible layouts had been taken over by tumblr. If you ever feel the need to know why 99% of professional devs aren't 12, check out a couple of "custom" tumblr styles.
I'm surprised Tripod.com is still hosting my Pokemon site, Pikachu's Place [1]! I used take screenshots of episodes by taking pictures of the TV using a digital camera and uploaded them to the site. Hilarious.
Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics!
Wow, tripod... no pokemon for me (I was a bit too old for that craze), but they are still hosting my site with screenshots for a Quake3 bsp renderer I wrote back then:
Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.
The one that started it for me was HTML 4 for the World Wide Web; the book's website is a quaint look back at an era of frames and tables for layout: http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/
My pages from back then (it must have been 1996 or 1997) were hosted at the local ISP, and they've since disappeared into the mists of time, but I definitely had a <marquee> with other tags nested inside. More importantly, I was making my first forays into programming... in VBScript and JScript. I soon moved on to "real" languages, but now we've come full circle, and JavaScript in the browser is the place to be again.
I got my start from something a bit more modest - the HTML chapter of some Pocket Guide to the World Wide Web. I ate it up. I wrote tonnes of pages.
I remember my dad saying that if I got a domain name and it got popular, I could rake in tonnes from sponsorship. I was amazed. I asked him if he could buy me a domain. He said no :( In fairness, I was only 10...
What's quite funny is that I actually work for a company that has essentially done the above and actually provides a big portion of revenue. The pages are not much better quality either (they need more <blink> tag imo).
Man, if I had known that badge existed I would've stuck it everywhere.
I think one of the reasons I'm so confident with web stuff nowadays is that for the first 3 or 4 years I had literally no idea there were text editors other than Notepad. I remember trying to put together a simple web site on Mac OS X, which frustrated me greatly because I had no idea where to find a plain text editor (for some reason I never found the toggle in TextEdit.app, let alone opened the terminal to run Vim).
Off topic, but I had a fun exchange with my friend the other day. I'm a web developer - he had recently taken a free (paid for by EI) course in web development.
"Can I just borrow your computer for a sec? I noticed a bug on one of my sites, just need to fix it real quick."
"You won't be able to, I don't have Dreamweaver or Filezilla installed."
"Oh...ok."
Proceeds to download putty on the spot and fix my site with vim
Sometimes I long for the simplicity of the 1x1 transparent gif. Combined with tables for layout, it really brought the notion of "design" to the web and helped transform the web to mass medium.
Can anyone explain the bit about 1x1.gif being the only way, to this day, to vertically center elements? AFAIK there's still no way to vertically center a dynamic height element without javascript, so if invisible gifs can do it I'd at least like to know how.
I don't know about spacer gifs, but you can use tables. Or fake tables using CSS. JavaScript definitely isn't required, even to vertically center things in IE6.
Oh yeah the dreaded 1x1 pixel gif. Some genius motherfucker used one of those beauties in a large corporate site I was working on and was using it to indent header text - with javascript.
I just about went blind trying to find it and swore if I ever found that guy I would fight him. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy we've moved on to bigger and better things.
Well the postmaster looked after sendmail, that being the old word for the man in charge of the post office. The hostmaster looked after DNS because it rhymed, and they needed a word for the guy who looked after the website.
It was a very different meaning from today's "rockstar ninja".
I thought homepage was just whatever page you had your browser set to start up on. And then some of us built personal home pages that had all the links we cared about on them. And then one of us built Personal Home Pages.
Funny. The term is still in use; I think it's usually meant to imply a deeper level of ownership, a la sysadmin. A few times a year people contact me saying they need a webmaster, and the way they describe their needs, I wouldn't say that "developer" really covers it.
I built various quake2 clan pages in the 90ies with humongous table layouts and cgi scripts to enter clan wars...i wish i would have saved that stuff somewhere...
Zach doesn't look old enough to have been able to understand HTML in the 90ies though imo ;)
ROFL that's hilarious in so many ways. The 1 pixel gif was used as a cached item... by inlining it as a data image he's making that effort useless. I love this article.
Ugh.. the rendering bugs.. when combining tables and divs... IE for the longest time had a bug where combining table and div elements nested, when exceeding a certain complexity, you'd just get a white screen... It was fixed in IE6 on XP, but not on earlier versions of windows.
That was a nightmare of support issues on a few apps for me.
I used Dreamweaver and hosted in AngelFire, and later on Hypermart. Optimized for Altavista. Signed up for link exchanges. "Submitted" my site to the 1000 search engines. Good ole days.
403 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadhttp://caniuse.com/ can answer these questions for you in general. If you're looking into newer layout techniques, you should also check out flexbox.
And the <hr> tag. And I remember I made a Java applet that consumed so many resources that everyone who visited my page thought their machine had locked up. Good times.
http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/hr.html
It's all about that terrible blue button in Dreamweaver that animated concentric circles when you hovered over it..
http://grox.net/doc/web/javascript/dynduo/
Hey, there's another one for the list: only '90s web developers know what it's like to have to learn new technologies by going to Barnes & Noble and buying a book about them.
Part of me wants to build a bonfire and toss it on. The other part of me goes, "But that's a book. A completely useless except as a curiosity for historians book, but still a book."
I remember learning Java from a book, and many of my lightbulb moments about programming came from reading code, not writing it.
EDIT: Holy crap... I still have the bookmark for DD (and JavaScript Kit at the old http://www.wsabstract.com domain) in an "Imported" bookmarks folder in Chrome. I'm not sure how many browsers those have been through over the years.
But you gained a lot of arcane knowledge in the end, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.infosystems.www...
<SCRIPT><!-- self.defaultStatus="Welcome to my website!" //--></SCRIPT>
Except that blink only existed in Netscape and marquee only existed in IE, and you could not have a webpage with both before around 2004, when firefox got support for marquee. At that point both tags were almost universally despised.
This is what it does to the BS3 docs page: http://i.imgur.com/VQNlsZy.png
Discussion is still going strong in Bugzilla, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790
Noise filter, sheer, blur, fuck with the levels, colorize with a horribly bright shade of something. If you fucked it up bad enough you couldn't tell it wasn't repeating. 90x90 and 120x120 all the way down.
That and making an amazing image with a completely pointless sun glare filter and then cutting the image into cubes so you could display it on the site. Thats how "consultants" overcame HTML limitations for a long ass time.
lol, fuck. I remember every goddamned thing on that page.
The dude coding in the lower right was a nice touch. Haven't seen that in a long time.
Ah yes, HTML For Dummies. For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my elementary school Pokemon craze led me to create my first serious website from scratch, Mew's Hidden Lair [1]. Except back then it was Dummies 101: HTML [2]. And I do remember how magical it was to type in that command and see an image of Pikachu show up on my screen.
Reading the article and writing this post has been a serious trip down memory lane. Great, now I'm nostalgic. Back to work I guess...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010518071345/http://www.fortun...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-Tech/dp/0764...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpag...
1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.
I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.
What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.
Still after all these years, the scars earned in web development projects, make me jump of joy when I get to do native desktop stuff instead.
It's not nearly as bad as the bad old days so to speak, and a lot of things can be very clean and elegant.
This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.
What a sucker I was! Good thing PHP came along and taught us all what true webmastery is.
SSI changed my life, and I coded a 50 page website in a textarea. on 28.8. In the snow. Without shoes.
Not much has changed. I use vim now.
ahh... memories :)
I even remember the exact full URL of the website[0]. But between the demise of Geocities and the demise of my 386's hard drive, that piece of nostalgia is gone forever.
I remember dedicating a page to all of the different "strategies" to catch Mew in Gen I games, before we all collectively decided that this was impossible to do without a Gameshark[1]. Little did we know that there was a technique - it just wouldn't be discovered until ~2003[2]]!
[0] For those just tuning in this century, Geocities would provide webspace (that's a word I haven't used in a while!) and your homepage would be a URL of the format http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234
[1] "When I was your age, Action Replay was a Gameshark..."
[2] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch
https://archive.org/web/geocities.php
There was a huge push on archiveteam to scrape as much as they could before it was shut down. If it was saved it'll have the same url on reocities
https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.o...
Looks like I was a pattern of grid design (ala tables) back then.
Maybe Pokemon can be the new Hello World.
I still remember sitting there hours and days banging my head on the table how to get this school logo exactly in the center at the top of the page where it had to stay visible even if the page was scrolled, because "it has to be up there. And it must be always visible." Fun times.
http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities
The file was huge, about several hundred gigabyte. I didn't download it, because I don't have enough space and downloading it would take ages with my slow connection.
On http://reocities.com/ you can browse through some of the old pages and sites, but many things are broken now, missing images.
Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics!
[1] http://pika299.tripod.com/
http://gmcbay.tripod.com/
And my OpenGL driver for the Genesis engine.. the download zip of source code even still works:
http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html
Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.
My pages from back then (it must have been 1996 or 1997) were hosted at the local ISP, and they've since disappeared into the mists of time, but I definitely had a <marquee> with other tags nested inside. More importantly, I was making my first forays into programming... in VBScript and JScript. I soon moved on to "real" languages, but now we've come full circle, and JavaScript in the browser is the place to be again.
I remember my dad saying that if I got a domain name and it got popular, I could rake in tonnes from sponsorship. I was amazed. I asked him if he could buy me a domain. He said no :( In fairness, I was only 10...
What's quite funny is that I actually work for a company that has essentially done the above and actually provides a big portion of revenue. The pages are not much better quality either (they need more <blink> tag imo).
http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and...
...or the thousands of other badges that I, for whatever reason had to shoehorn into my website?
"Can I just borrow your computer for a sec? I noticed a bug on one of my sites, just need to fix it real quick."
"You won't be able to, I don't have Dreamweaver or Filezilla installed."
"Oh...ok."
Proceeds to download putty on the spot and fix my site with vim
The request is still being discussed in Bugzilla :) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790
jsfiddle itself doesn't work in IE8, so hier is a direct link: http://fiddle.jshell.net/QVQLN/show/
http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/demos/vertic...
I just about went blind trying to find it and swore if I ever found that guy I would fight him. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy we've moved on to bigger and better things.
Speaking of SHTML... has anyone else always read it as "shitmail" in their head?
[1] http://www.goer.org/htmlhorror/htmlhorror1.html
It was a very different meaning from today's "rockstar ninja".
[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565923256.do
I used to use an editor called Arachnophilia [3], which surprisingly is still in development. Way better than FrontPage.
[1] http://www.effectmaker.com/gallery/jsslidemenu/index.html
[2] http://www.effectmaker.com/gallery/jsimageswapmenu/index.htm...
[3] http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.php
Possibly my favorite bug ever: HTML has a weird relationship with whitespace; usually it doesn't matter much, except when it does: http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol7/html_no1.htm
This is one of the few bugs I've encountered that still makes me angry to this day. I spent so much time trying to figure it out.
That was a nightmare of support issues on a few apps for me.
I don't think you need to be a 90s developer for that. Look at the HTML of the website you're currently using.