Thanks for the flashbacks! I had blacked out any memories of the world before 'border-radius' before seeing that!

Well I just discovered this 11 year old Firefox bug due to that page

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477157

Check color box with rounded corner in LaTeX, people are still living with it nowadays...

That was really great! Thanks!

Oh god, that reminds me of all the times I claim something is technically impossible only to find out there’s a really easy way to do it.

Except using a phased array to locate RFID tags using backscatter. That was just plain hard.

Wow, you weren't kidding!

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/timeline/hewlett-pa...

That reminds me of the old trick of using a 1x1 pixel in an empty table cell to ensure that internet explorer would actually expand the table cell to whatever width you set it to (height still needed another trick if i recall correctly).   would work, too, but then the minimum height of the cell would be whatever the line height was set to, and the line-height property didn't behave the same across browsers.

It's funny how old tricks make a comeback. I see a lot of  's in React codebases to preserve whitespace around JSX tags.

To invoke the old "rule 5" of explaining things:

Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to make a rectangular element on a webpage have rounded corners. People had to use all sorts of dirty hacks to make a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted to various forms of "putting a picture of a rounded corner" (often a gif) in each of the corners of the element you were putting on the page.

There were a lot of different ways to do that, but one of them was to use "tables" - tables these days are usually only used for what their genuine, semantic intent is: for drawing a literally spreadsheet-like table of data. But back in the earliest days of the web, they were the only controllable way to visually lay things out on any kind of grid, so despite the fact that they were "supposed" to have nothing to do with visual layout, they'd get used all the time for that - often getting used to do visual borders and stuff.

So to do rounded corners, you'd basically make a table that was a 3x3 grid. In the corner elements of the grid, you'd have tiny pictures of rounded corners; in the side elements of the grid you'd basically have nothing (they'd be really skinny elements, either very wide or tall). Then the middle element in the grid would be gigantic, and would hold your actual content.

Or by just using Flash.

I never did it myself. I know there are plenty of reasons to dislike flash. And I know plenty of people absolutely hated sites created solely using Flash.

But I have to admit I enjoyed the creativity I saw on many Flash sites. There a generic sameness to much of the modern web. I know Flash sites were useless for SEO, and probably for accessibility too. So I don't think things are necessarily worse now. Just more generic.

Of course, you can create a Flash-like site using web-native technologies, but it's probably more work.

YES BABY!!! I use to do it all the time. =)

https://web.archive.org/web/20040204003135/http://www.realid...

You know it. 9 cells tables, slicing your pixel-perfect corners in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, exporting as a gif with transparent color.

That also reminds of the transparent 1px gif "hack".

I'm not that nostalgic about that. Once in a while all that knowledge comes in handy for troubleshooting an email template...

Is this code adding successive divs to simulate rounded corners? Looks incredible -- invariably someone would need animation on these too would this work?

Almost definitely, but it isn't even nearly as mindblowing to a casual outside observer as a cool UE demo.

Read the parent again with this playing in the background for peak webdev irony.

Yea man! Border-radius changed the game and made nine-slices method legit

I remember using a JS poly fill with modernizr to get it to work like as soon as it came out and making pixel perfect images to use with it!