Only 90s web developers remember this (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

zachholman.com

628 pointsFiveplus345 comments

My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like:

Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site

Owner: You wrote this?

Me: Yeah.

Owner: This is in Perl?

Me: Yeah.

So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those pages.

How hard could that be?

So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and  s all over the place and I remember looking at it and thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck.

But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good.

The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9 an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.

I wish interviews were like this. Show them something you built and you get hired instead of the nonsense of leetcode.

My story upthread is pretty much the same, except that I demonstrated a record-keeping application written in Turbo Pascal :-)

My first program (that wasn't just printing 'you suck' over and over in basic on the C64) was in Turbo Pascal. It used showed how light defracted in different materials using Snell's Law.

It was great.

For my very first interview I was told “write something in php” so I put together a few scripts to parse templated txt files into html and made a little baby version of a cms. Wasn’t exactly scalable or ground breaking but I thought it was cool. But the engineer that interviewed me was like so this imports text files and it took you all afternoon to build it? …didn’t get that job.

So the next one was pretty similar “hey use this language called Sikuli to build something.” Now, I’d never heard of Sikuli but it was basically python so I built a little app that, based on the screen, could offer up context sensitive hotkey chains…kind of like a baby version of Alfred that literally only worked with Microsoft office. But the guy thought it was cool and hired me anyway :)

Went from working in a gas station over night to working in my kitchen or the coffee shop. I thought it was sooooo cool

I'm thinking of changing jobs and the need for me to do leetcode and answer trivia gotcha questions vexes me. More than 10 years of professional experience and like 5-6 years of hobbyist experience as a web master for 00's websites, and managing ecommerce sites with >$1M's in revenue doesn't count for anything.

FWIW, that's how I structure my interviews typically, so they still exist in some places.

For anyone reading along I highly encourage that; there's way more signal to noise hearing about some project they worked on and why they were proud enough to put it on their resume than 'did they remember the algorithmic call/response'. You can't beat an almost post mortem discussion where you let the interviewee lead on what they think went well and what they'd have done differently with hindsight.

Do you find it works even if they can't actually show you any code, because it's proprietary belong to other employers?

Yes. If people talk enough they can’t help but share all the relevant details if you know enough about creating medium or large sized systems. Also I ask questions for stories about troubleshooting bugs, and when to log, some story when logs And I would rather hire someone that iterates well over the weeks or months time frame than can solve something quickly.

For newbies, it’s harder.

100% this. All you really have to do is get people talking. Have them tell you a story and ask for details. If they have trouble when you get into details then they are making it up. If not you should have a fun conversation.

As a recent interviewee I can say that I'd be asked about code I was proud of. The last place I worked for was well-known enough or could be looked up easily and was small, so I explained what our main solution did, a particular issue we faced and how I planned and implemented a fix. Led to some good conversations with pseudocode, and didn't break any NDAs.

Shockingly low percentage of people have built something they are proud to talk about. All them were good hires tho, as long as the explanations are detailed enough that it was work they actually did or adopted well enough.

Even the stuff we are proud of isn't possible to talk about due to NDAs.

If you put a little work in, you can talk about nearly every project. Even stuff like classified satellites have been discussed; you just act respectful to the interviewee's boundaries (which you should be doing anyway).

I got hired on at a Fortune 500 company in the early 2000s. One of the reasons I've stuck around (besides the great pay and benefits) is that I've read all the horror stories of leetcode interviews. I have zero interest in participating in that nonsense. One benefit of this is, when I am interviewing people to fill development position, I never do any of that leetcode nonsense.

You should still check out to see if your pay is competitive for your role, level, etc.

Even an awesome environment might be worth moving away from if your pay goes up 50-100%. Especially if you're not super frugal or have expenses due to other reasons.

The problem is I don’t want to move (great house, low mortgage, great area, etc.). There really aren’t any other major companies within 300 miles and all the smaller companies in the area don’t pay anywhere close to what my company pays.

But is it worth doing leetcode? I find I can’t bring myself to do it even if it would guarantee me a FAANG position and probably triple my salary overnight.

Overengineering starts with the interview.

It's probably not worth it on its own.

But if that tripled salary enables you to do things you love you can't do now and it enables them both today and long term... then it might be worth it :-)

Well you can interview while you have your job and no one needs to be any wiser. You can be sure that at least annually the company is looking to stay lean and mean and right size you if it fits their economic goals for the company.

I try to drag this out of candidates, but it's often very hard... Surprisingly few people actually code outside their jobs/education... Job code is obviously a no-go, and academics are usually pre-skeletoned work, So when I ask them to show me their favorite project, they often draw a blank...

I was lucky and I did a side project my last year of college abusing Hadoop to make a web scraper & analysis tool on one. Probably got me my first 2 jobs because I LOVED to talk about that project, and it let me break out of my fearful and introverted shell to show a wider range of skills

In fairness it isn’t a great filter. As someone that had a similar story - I got a very well paying job out of high school based in part on some home grown apps 20ish years ago - the field of people doing small scale stuff was small and any basic CRUD app, let alone embedded hardware hacking made you instantly look like a wizard - since getting started then was much harder - any output was proof of a certain level of skill in acquiring knowledge that was above average even if the overall scope wasn’t huge. In this day of Arduinos/RPi and git pull boilerplate, a small app or hardware project doesn’t prove much of anything. The scale of side project to really differentiate is beyond what most people reasonably have time for if they wish to have a life. I think compensated take home assignments still have some merit though.

It is if you’ve built something.

Most people don’t have much to show.

One problem is that the big companies (that, for the most part, pay the big bucks and people care about and other small companies look to) are market movers. If they are known to be doing some alternative to leetcode then leetcode-type websites and study programs will pop right up to optimize for whatever new metric they have. If they start to prioritize things you've built over ability to perform, you can bet your bottom dollar that within a week there will be a million guides on crafting the optimal cookiecutter project to get in the door at Facebook available on the web. And the signal will lose its value. A signal has to be costly to acquire and algorithmic prowess, although made easier through things like leetcode, is costly for everyone to acquire which is why it holds its value.

Requiring coding tests etc just wasn't filtering more than random chance when I was hiring. I ended up pulling in people who had the most preposterous CVs to see what they were actually like.

One guy was a ninja. A black belt in ninjitsu, apparently. I asked him about his ninja skills (he looked like Harry Knowles). He said he could make himself invisible. I was like O_O. I asked him to demonstrate. He said he couldn't do it right now as we already knew he was there. I told him to leave the meeting room and "come back in invisible." He said it didn't work like that. I asked how it works. He said "Let's say I'm at a party.. I can enter the room and walk completely through the crowded room and not a single person will notice me." I think I know what was happening....

The few interviews I had were exactly like that. Not sure if it's a regional thing or if I have just been lucky.

But telling to story how young horny me built porn sites and learned SEO the hard way was actually a selling point so far.

I hear you - the 90s were insane. In the space of six months I went from a factory worker (12 hour shifts, all night-shift, 7 days a week) to a computer lab assistant to a entry-level software developer.

First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to build the CGI binaries.

Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating around everywhere[1].

[1] Well, until the bust came in late 90s :-)

Oh my god you made me remember getting MRTG set up at my job in high school so we could get per-port graphs from a managed switch.

the most difficult people are the less knowledgeable it seems

Great story. So often these end in the person throwing up their hands and walking away, but I'm glad you were both able to work it out :)

Well what was I going to do, go back to the factory?

I was all-in.

Great story. Sure sounds like Dreamweaver. My go to back then was Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft.

I did the customized splash screen for the version of Paint Shop Pro that was bundled with Hotdog Pro.

Holy crap, paint shop pro. Memories. I supposed that was about version 4 or 5?

> Hotdog Pro from Sausagesoft

IIRC, one of the early marketing "Built in Delphi!" examples.

Great story. I feel like many of us from the 90s have similar stories.

I was a CS undergrad, and was introduced to someone who needed a software person. Got hired at $8/hour part time to write VB, Access, and MSSQL software - none of which I had ever touched. Same deal, either I figure it out or he would let me go. Couple weeks later my boss came in, loosely described an application, and then asked if I could have something demoable in 2 hours. He had a client meeting and need to show something to get partial payment. Got it done and almost immediately got a raise to $12/hour. Obviously the place had a lot of issues and was out of business in the next couple years, but it gave me the mentality early on of execute and ship. Good times indeed.

And yeah...I was waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant a month before...

Back in the day, HTML usually came with its own built-in version control. You could view source and see exactly what thought process the web designer (read: the person who figured out HomeSite first) had gone through, like:

  <font color=“red”>
  <font color=“blue”>
  <font color=“green”>
  Hi there
  </font>
  </font>
  </font>

because the editors didn’t actually understand HTML beyond what was required to wrap a tag around a block of text.

I bet this is what a word doc looks like under the hood.

Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out.

We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch.

Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.

Funnily enough you can see what a word doc looks like because the x in .docx is “XML” so save the word doc as .html and bask in the flaming dumpster fire of the font definitions at the top inline CSS.

Yes, versus the old school .doc format, pre-xml, which was a proprietary format, but was reverse engineered by most of Microsoft's rivals. at least wordperfect had pretty good support.

I think Microsoft introduced .docx in what? Office.NET.

I was in a class where week one was “create a blog to keep track of the rest of the projects this semester” and for many of us, no big deal, static site generator, pick a theme for a wordpress, whatever. One of my classmates tho had never touched HTML and was super stressed about the assignment until they stumbled upon the fact the Word can export HTML - and its easy enough to highlight text and add hyperlinks to other html website so, bingo, whole semester’s work published in Word. Yes the auto-generated markup is horrendous but it gets the job done, full marks.

If you dig deep enough, Word can still directly publish to blog sites such as WordPress using the MetaWeblog API as well as native SharePoint publishing (but who uses that?!)

Well, actually :-) docx is a zipped container, so if you rename it as .zip and open that up, you can see the xml files inside there. No need to save as, it's all right there as OpenXML [1].

If you save the doc as xml, there's some overlap, but that's an older technology called WordML [2].

I've spent way too much time creating spreadsheets on ancient legacy unix systems, in dozens of different ways. OpenXML is not the easiest, but it is the best of a lot of bad options...

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
  [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_XML_formats

There is a 'Web Page, Filtered' Save As option in Word, which saves the document in MUCH cleaner HTML than the standard 'Web Page' version. Granted, it's not as good as it could be, but it's definitely way better. It's clean and predicable enough to run it through stuff like PanDoc and get acceptable results.

I believe .pptx (PowerPoint) files are ZIP's, too. Try changing a .pptx file to .zip.

Every Office file format ending in an X is a .zip file. Got inspired from Open/LibreOffice's file formats heavily.

At my first webdev job (1998) I built websites for seafood companies. Microsoft FrontPage was the tool my boss handed me. I was appalled at the HTML it was producing, and succeeded in convincing him to let me use Dreamweaver instead; for a 20th century WYSIWYG editor, it was pretty good.

The best was when they wanted you to throw a curved border around something in an age before floats or border radii. You could do it multiple different ways, but usually it just involved slicing up an image and throwing the image elements into a table which wrapped your content.

I remember being so excited when I figured out how to hide the borders of frames and do a layout with nested tables.

Probably the one trick I learned back then that I still use today is naming the target in links. I remember noticing Yahoo doing it on their Fantasy Football setup so that if you clicked on the news beside a bunch of different players and clicked the same one more than once, it would only load the player into its specific window. Since I’ve always been a person that opens tons of links as I’m going through a page and then reads each of them after, it was nice to not have duplicate windows (tabs) everywhere.

Still works and to this day I never use target=“_blank”.

This is amazing, I never heard of that but will make sure to do this in future. Small gimmick, big use :)

Love your story, it reminds me of my first long term software gig, where I was actually stacking boxes and writing software. I was managing an eCommerce site for a local gym! Best of both worlds?

I think everyone should get some grassroots software work under their belt, it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.

I don't want to soapbox too much, but it is part of my hope for the eventually reduction of software salaries, so that software can become a more integrated and boutique part of life. There are so many problems that would be better solved with small scale software instead of impersonal SaaS.

Yeah. I'm enjoying the current inflated salaries but this is not sustainable, and it really shuts smaller, non-software companies out of having inhouse fulltime developers.

    it's a really different experience working as a 
    team member in an unrelated industry and providing 
    a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.

This can be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. It all depends on whether or not management is willing to learn about how the software development process works and adapt to it.

I remember the days from 2000-2015, I worked at a few places like this. Doing "revolutionary" things like actually introducing source control, offsite backups, etc. to places that had never heard of such things.

At some places this was challenging, but rewarding. At other places ownership was constantly aghast when they had to shell out for some random software licenses or SaaS subscriptions. I view it as a part of my job to explain and justify expenditures, but going to war with management over every rando $100 "what the FUCK is 'git hub???'" purchase gets old fast.

Overall though, I am now a little nostalgic...

Heh, I remember an owner coming into my office (doing warehouse picking software at a warehouse company) asking wtf was this $300 charge. I told him “yeah, that’s a license to use this software for a year.” He went “oh, for the year. That’s only $25 a month? Carry on!” the nostalgia is real.

Have a look at the relationship between productivity and salaries, and also minimal wage and inflation.

It's not development jobs that are inflated; rather, it's most of the other jobs that are deflated.

(this is a rule of thumb, and exceptions apply)

> I miss the good ol’ days. Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of JavaScript, of all things

It seems I learnt HTML just between these two eras. After the  , 1px spacers and tables, and before the piles of abstractions.

People cared about doing well formed XHTML and having those W3C Valid XHTML badges, and also those "install Firefox" buttons.

This was short so today everything looks ugly to me, old and new, in different ways.

I still use (polyglot) XHTML5 (HTML5 if I don't control everything being input) and avoid frontend frameworks and web fonts when I get to decide. This is a world where implementing a search bar for people who haven't discovered CTRL+F yet takes 30 lines of dumb Javascript and filters 200 items in 1 second on a slow computer without any caching trick and that does not require minifiers and bundlers. Which does not actually sound impressive, or shouldn't anyway. A world where when you disable Javascript, the page is still perfectly readable. A world where a silly mistake in the HTML markup is noticed.

To build an actual web application where it does not makes much sense to have the content as a web page, I started liking Svelte but I'll still at least consider doing things by manipulating the DOM directly before deciding.

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.

Golden times.

> you can't just view source and copy paste

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. :)

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.

> finding yourself unable to steal an image

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.

Or just printscreen?

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?

> and allowed for really beautiful graphic designs

So long as your browser window was the same resolution as the designers.

Source maps could be a saving grace here, if only more sites would ship them in production.

That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML" — I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".

Yeah, it is dynamic. But the author also mentioned putting spacer gifs in semantically appropriate containers, so I think it may have been a joke?

Yes the whole thing is a joke, and is sarcastic. At least, that's the impression I got.

I worked at homeshark.com (later rebranded iown.com) in the 90's, and we absolutely did the spacer gif trick to size our tables.

Oh yeah, i think every one did - but they certainly werent used in "semantically correct containers".

Even HN, this very website, still uses spacer gifs. Sadly.

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:

> img[src='s.gif'][width='40'] {width: 12px;}

(from https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css)

I don't understand why anyone would consider this sad.

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.

I think it is a joke.

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.

You could however nest horizontal and vertical marquee to make a diagonal marquee :)

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.

They have mistaken it with DCOM I believe.

I was thinking the same thing

In 2021 it would be "decentralized HTML".

HTML NFT's

NFTML. Non Fungible Token Markup Language. Also has the advantage of sounding like AI/ML tech.

You're very rich now, somehow.

HTML based NFTs are a thing. You can reference arbitrary HTML & JS from the 'animation_url' in the NFT's metadata and produce interactive NFTs.

ArcadeNFT is an example of a project that utilizes this: https://opensea.io/assets/0xa0c38108bbb0f5f2fb46a2019d7314cc...

2021 will be remembered as the year when all the jokes died. When everything is reality, there can be no satire.

> When everything is reality, there can be no satire.

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

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".

And HTML begat DHTML and DHTML begat XHTML and in woe and SOAP calls HTML5 was born

It's like "SpaceHTML". In space, they just call it "HTML".

But.....it’s dynamic.

DHTML means using Javascript to animate multiple LAYER tags inside of Netscape Communicator 4. The "D" stands for "Daft".

Good old document.layers vs document.all. And don’t nest your tables more than seven levels deep or Netscape will explode.

I came over to post this. I’ve never heard “distributed HTML”. And I’m not even sure what the distributed part would be.

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.

Maybe they were confusing it with DCOM (distributed COM) which was often talked about around that time.

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”.

Which is the origin of hotmail.com, too. It was stylized as HoTMaiL.com when launched.

The awesome thing about that period was how we learned. You'd be on a web page, see something funky (positioning, rounded corners, etc) and be like "how the heck did they do that?".

Then you do the ol' "View Source" and now that technique is in your toolkit. In fact you'd prob head right over to your geocities site and try it out right away.

AKA the web was always a bunch of cargo cult, NIH about the most basic computer programming tasks, etc.

Yeah this was awesome time and it did teach you more than just the trick, navigating unknown codebases, extracting the meaningful parts of a non trivial piece in f code…

I really think the web community lost something with the transition to compiled uglified js and css…. Sure google will show you to some code if you manage to put what you are looking for into words but that isn’t always easy. Pitty that there is no standardised solution to publish the source along with the Minimized script nowadays.

There is. Source Maps.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/So...

Can’t tell if you’re sarcastic or not, assuming not all comment readers will be aware either way.

Very few sites ship source maps to production.

Just for the record, source maps are awesome and (unfortunately) typically disabled on production. The original remark was criticism towards this practice.

With developer tools, this has only gotten easier.

Except now it just shows

Good luck with that!

What developer tools doesn't show you the generated html? Are you using a major web browser?

Just seeing the generated HTML is trying to figure out the blueprint of the building by looking at the facade.

Sure there's source map files, but most of the time you'll fine those aren't distributed together with the minified bundles.

I’ve struggled for ever with modern pages to find out what even listeners are attached to particular html elements. Is that even possible to find out? Say you’re on a webpage, and when you click a button a bunch of JS happens. Except it’s all minifies uglified. But the browser must know what JS will run when clicking that button. How do I make it show me what that code/function is without trawling through the JS code and hunting for a CSS selector or ID?

At least Firefox makes it easy to show which listeners are on which elements in the Web Developers tools. <old schmuck>The thing that looks like Firebug anyway.</old schmuck>

That you'll be able to actually read the code is another completely different story.

In Chrome you can get the event listeners for a given element by selecting/highlighting it in the Elements tab, then jumping across to the Console tab, you use:

  getEventListeners($0)

getEventListeners is a Chrome console/devtools only function and $0 is a console placeholder variable for the currently selected element.

It's definitely not the nicest way to find things and you often end up running into the minified/uglified madness when delving deeper, but sometimes it helps do the trick.

This is the thing I miss the most. View-Source was the source of truth. No JavaScript filling in empty <div>s bullshit, No minifying, no uglifying.

Yes, and I hated who came up with the tableless websites lol

For CSS and HTML it's still easy and even easier to do so by right clicking and selecting "Inspect element" (something we didn't have back then). I often do that to understand how a page is setup and I don't see what's so hard about it it.

For JS it's a different story of course but it was never that easy to begin with since the code that affects an element can be anywhere.

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]

0: https://web.archive.org/web/19980709151514/http://scriptarch...

1: https://jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/

CGI Proxy takes me back for exactly the reason you describe - bypassing filters on the school network :-)

> Matts Script Archive

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.

I was a high school dropout working in a skate shop in the mid 90s, teaching myself web design via view-source, and the owner of the shop asked if I could build him a little website for the store. This was back when only big companies had websites, so him having one for his little skate shop was mind blowing to everyone. I had no idea what I was doing... just copy/pasting various bits I liked from big websites like Microsoft.com or telco websites as they had the "nicest" sites at the time.

It got me poached by a media company who was all-in on the dotcom boom hype and convinced we'd all be billionaires within a year. They paid me stupid amounts of money (for a dropout skater who refused to wear a button up shirt to work) and I cranked out crappy HTML templates for them to sell to people who had "an idea and some money", investing their life savings in the "next big thing". Always felt dirty working there, so I wasn't upset when they went bust and ended up owing millions to creditors and losing everything they had.

That all led to a 20 year career in web stuff for F500s and Government as I self-taught my way through web design, to graphic design, to front end dev, to back end dev, then to netsec. To this day I never finished school or got any qualifications, new jobs would come to me via old jobs. Something I think would be impossible in IT today.

I left tech about 10 years ago now and mostly work on old cars and be a dad, reading HN to see how much things have changed and for the nostalgia trips like this. It's insane seeing how different things are when it wasn't "that" long ago. I can't think of any other industry that can be so unrecognisable within such a short timeframe.

> 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?

I suppose you leave all your links blue as well?

No, they had an appropriate color, different from normal text.

Only if I haven't followed them yet.

Because you could?

Or pick a 90's trope: Ironic detachment? Only things that are obscure are cool?

Probably the same reason we started to like flat buttons?

Wait, some people actually like flat buttons?

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.

In a word: print designers.

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.

Agreed. I mean, the whole web page thing is literally a metaphor for people shuffling pages on their office desk.

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.

I think that's because the underline makes the text hard to read especially in badly designed fonts.

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.

For me, followed links on HN are a lighter grey.

Remains the same colour for me on both Firefox and Safari.

I loved when I figured out I could get rid of the underline and add a dashed or dotted bottom border instead, it looked so cutting edge at the time.

and in the a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active order generally too... or as I remembered them... love, hate.

1x1 pixel GIFs are still in use on places like Amazon where the 1x1 GIF image is overlayed on top of another (larger) image. It's to stop people right-clicking and saving the larger image to their device (because copyright). Anyways I can just press F12 and 'steal' the image from devtools, so it's not hard to overcome.

> places like Amazon

And places like this site right here, where it provides indentation for comments among other things! Search the source for `s.gif` - https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif

Some sites that are more savvy now prevent you from getting into dev tools altogether. That and Google looking to make the whole web canvas is a disturbing trend.

I've seen websites hijack the keyboard shortcut and prevent right clicking from opening the context menu but none that actually prevented dev tools from being opened

I recently came across an image I wasn't able to download using dev tools and was shocked. I wish I had had the time to figure it out.

Link the page please?:)

If it's visible, it's capturable, it's simply a matter of how obfuscated it is and how much effort you want to spend capturing it. In highly dynamic web apps these days, it could be simple as a right click or as complex as figuring out their rendering system, source data stream, generated key handshake to verify it's the script accessing the data and not a person, and so on. I see this sort of trash a lot more than I care to.

Well, you can just PrntScrn it as a last resort, if it's not a background image :-)

I once broke the "DRM" of a site which displayed images by downloading them obfuscated and using a big blob of JS to unfsck them and display them on a canvas. Grabbing the image should be easy, no? Just use `.toDataURL()`, right? Well, this site deleted all the methods on the canvas object which could be used to grab the image data, and then `.freeze()` (or maybe it was `.seal()`, this was a while ago) to prevent the method being added back in.

In the end I said 'fuck it' and made a patched firefox build in a VM with freeze and/or seal disabled completely, then a small jetpack addon (remember them?) to unfsck the canvas element and grab them images.

You probably could've used `HTMLCanvasElement.prototype.toDataURL.call` on the canvas element

Hah, I knew a JS wizard would come up with an easier solution after I posted that. Perhaps I'll have to re-sub to that site to see if they've changed their DRM scheme...

That's easier than my solution. I've got a user script that backs up some methods that runs before the page loads, and a corresponding bookmarklet to restore them.

I believe that tracking pixels (1x1) are still very popular for mining browsing activity

Yes. Facebook literally calls it the Facebook Pixel for this reason.

The author forgot making rounded corners using images! I kind of miss the creativity of old web development, especially before responsive web design. There was so much more variation and most sites didn't look like the default bootstrap template. But there were a lot of bad things about this era, particularly non standard browsers

>rounded corners using images

My brain is not happy to have this memory dragged out of cold storage!

Like others here, I got my start answering an ad for someone who knew HTML forms, which I taught myself the day before the interview. Then quit my university job of menial labour and haven't looked back. Incredible times.

I remember a great trick from Technorati where you’d load one image of a circle with CSS background and reposition it four times with <b> tags. It was a work of art.

Also rounded corners using a 3x3 table and 8 images (4 for corners, 4 for the sides scaled to 100%) were fully responsive.

This is still used today for building Android apps, it's called a nine patch.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/graphics/drawable...

I remember at one point I had an animated imagemap as my main navigation....

I'm missing the <marquee>:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/marqu...

, the "under construction" GIFs:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/9akenz/this-guy-compiled-eve...

and those lightsaber horizontal content dividers.

And out of topic dancing dog / cat GIFs. And horrible gray backgrounds. Or worse, not gray backgrounds.

Sometime in the 2000s I learned that using the css left attribute to animate marquee like text flows, worked much better (smoother and I think also performance wise). I was a bit surprised, that some handmade marquee was performing better than the native original.

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 :)

Btw. isn't DHTML for "Dynamic HTML"?

'Btw. isn't DHTML for "Dynamic HTML"?' Yes [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

>Btw. isn't DHTML for "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.

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.

I'll always have a fond memory of window.status, which still exists but doesn't do anything on the majority of browsers anymore as they don't have status bars to modify the text of.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/stat...

I hadn't thought about status bar marquee scripts in a hot minute! Thanks for that.

It's ok, there's a replacement. Now you put your marquee in the URL bar.

A casualty of the forced segregation to 16:9 monitors early in the century.

I still remember the day I learned how to animate text in the status bar. I felt like being a wizard!

A lot of old 90's "hacks" are still commonplace in current email design. Thanks to Outlook's reliance on a brain dead MS Word-based rendering system rather than using actual modern HTML5.

And since Outlook is still the standard for email clients in the workplace, all other systems are impacted as well.

It's interesting to see modern day developers struggle with email design and turn to folks like us :D

Ironically Gmail's web based email client also renders the HTML bad. I guess they emulate what Outlook is doing.

Honestly, at this point we should classify "Email HTML" as a different subspecies than regular ol' Web HTML. They evolved from a common ancestor, sure, but Email HTML is like some sort of flightless bird on a remote Pacific island: it kinda just... stopped.

Gmail and Outlook basically define "Email HTML".

I came here to say the same thing. We use mjml to abstract away all this nonsense for us. Great library.

https://mjml.io/

Thank you, will check it out.

Wow!

Thanks to pixel fonts, I was able to build a multi-million dollar project for Pocket PC Devices during the early 2000s. It has the clearest typography at that distance from the eye level, and the availability of the stylus made it possible to get 8-pt clear text. The project made a lot of physicians/clinics very happy and I got a lot of Thank You's for a very long time after its release.

Image Splicing. I remember building a developer tool, something of a 9-piece-splicer tool in Flash. It takes in an image, and spice the edges so you can have a liquid/elastic box with the desired border - sharp or rounded edges - use it with tables or DIVs.

Who remembers when everybody was syndicating all their favorite RSS feeds on their own blogs, and then some joker posted a blog entry to his own RSS feed with a title like "What happens when you put an unbalanced <BLINK> tag into the title?", and the ENTIRE BLOGOSPHERE started blinking?

I used to love throwing unclosed

    <marquee><blink>

into every guestbook and webring submission form I could find. Absolute chaos, in such an innocent and fun way.

These days it'd probably get you arrested and imprisoned for hacking or something.

The web was so FUN in the 90s.

You're unfortunately correct: if you live in one of the Neanderthal Red States that rejects all forms of science including Computer Science, you can get arrested for selecting "View Source" from the web browser menu. Be careful out there!

https://mashable.com/article/missouri-governor-mike-parson-r...

>Confused governor says looking at webpage's HTML is criminal hacking

>Putting on my hacker hoodie and clicking "view source."

>Gov. Mike Parson is sick and tired of all these sophisticated, no-good hackers and he's not going to take it any more. It's too bad the Missouri Republican has no idea what he's talking about.

>During a Thursday press conference, the confused elected official lashed out at a journalist who reported a vulnerability in an official Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website. The reporter, notably, waited until officials fixed the error before publishing the story. The flaw? The website apparently included teachers' Social Security numbers in the HTML.

https://twitter.com/GovParsonMO/status/1448697768311132160

>Governor Mike Parson @GovParsonMO

>Through a multi-step process, an individual took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code, and viewed the SSN of those specific educators.

>We notified the Cole County prosecutor and the Highway Patrol’s Digital Forensic Unit will investigate.

But in Missouri it's perfectly fine to have your mommy drive you across state lines with an illegal automatic weapon to viciously murder people protesting against racial injustice, in fact you'll be made a celebrated hero and invited to appear on TV fake news shows and intern in the halls of Congress (when you're not busy storming and vandalizing and defecating and urinating in them) by White Supremacists!

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/20/fox-news-tucke...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/582404-madison-cawthorn-o...

I just lost all respect for you. What a piece of crap you are.

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.

Forgot page counters.

/cgi-bin

ColdFusion

Absence of alpha-channel on gifs so having to match the background color.

But yes, it was the wild-wild-west of security holes out there! The amount of genius it takes to create a new web exploit these days is astonishingly high compared to 1994.

I made a one-page website for my neighbour's band and we set the counter to 174 so that it would look like people had visited. He called me as soon as I got home excited that the counter had gone up. Yeah, it does that when you look at it...

No mention of the page-view counter?

Remember those, we'd put the message "just a counter, don't click" beneath them.

also banner ads:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history

And web-rings!

Web Rings: the original social media network.

It's actually in the source in one of the examples! :)

> <IMG SRC="/cgi/webcounter.cgi">

Oh yeah, had one of those on my neopets shop along with a MIDI of Thank You by Dido.

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. ;-)

Nice, I love these kind of stories.

A 90s page isn't a 90s page without an animated gif of man digging a hole with "under construction".

Obligatory: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/

or a spinning skull gif

Other stuff I did was frames, because I didn't know how to do stuff on a server. So one frame for the menu and one for the header, things that should be equal on all pages.

Using lots of b-tags to create rounded borders. Or lots of images.

Faux columns to make it seem like different parts of the layout had the same size.

The golden layout or what it was called. Maybe a bit later than the 90s, when tables weren't as hip to use anymore.

I came in at "golden layout" and I still don't understand what was golden about it.

Don't forget rabid useragent sniffing to send browsers the "good pages": http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

this probably started in 1997-or 1998 or so, and probably had its apex in the mid 2000s especially with the hegemony of IE5.

And now today CloudFlare serves you a captcha if they don't like your user-agent and IP address combo.

It was x.gif, 1x1.gif was a waste of two bytes which was considerable savings on those insane table layouts.

It was t.gif, for transparent.

And it had to be transparent, because that was the only way you wouldn't see it when you added it to a table cell so the background color would show up.

Ours was called 0.gif

Clever - then you don't need to waste a whole byte for an ascii character!

Not sure about the browsers of that era, but modern browsers will happily display ".gif" (without a file name) or even "1" (without the .gif extension).

He forgot to mention hiding sensitive information behind a JS-powered script that had the password saved in the clear in the script on the page, and then disabling right-click events so you couldn't inspect the source of the page to find the super secret password...

Hint: it was totally unsafe then, it still is now.

I, as an embedded developer working for a vending machine manufacturer did this about 10 years ago.

The sales people came running and asked me to help them "fix the home page" because the sales chief had realised that diffrent markets could see what prices the other markets was being charged.

Not being a web guy, I said that we probably should have a look at the server code to see if we could figure out what to do.

Turns out there was no server code, just static web pages. I said we could probably password protect the price lists with javascript but any child who knew how to hit F12 would be able to see the prices anyway.

They said "What's F12? Can you do it today?"

Less we forget about <FRAME>

What an amazing time. Felt like the wild west back then.

Still feels like the wild west, just in a different way

Made me remember the International I hate Frames Club:

http://budugllydesign.com/frame9806/hateframe.html

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.

It’s archived on archive.org - I forget the url….

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 #)

There was no async in those days, we exchanged data through hidden iframes, just dont close the page because progress was gone.

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.

A memory seared into my brain from the 90s:

I was in the highschool computer lab, working on a website for the school IT administrator. She wanted me to include a patterned background, blinking marquees, GIFs, the whole nine yards. Another student was working on the project with me, sitting next to me. We were both facing the window, away from the door. The admin left the room. I told my fellow student these choices were extremely tacky, and I questioned the life choices that led her to the point of thinking this looked good.

Turns out she came back into the room and was behind me the whole time. Boy, did I feel like a jerk. I apologized.

What a different time that was.

This post reminded me of the "88x31 GIF Collection" post from a few months ago [1].

Weird to think about how much the Internet has changed. Makes me wonder how people will look back on today's Internet.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624

> Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of JavaScript, of all things.

from one 90's web developer to another:

https://htmx.org

<blink>hypermedia 4eva</blink>

Blink can be reimplemented in pure CSS

The most important table construct using a spacer-gif is missing!

  <TD WIDTH="300"><IMG SRC="/spacer.gif" WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="1"></TD>

defines a column of a minimum width of 200px and a maximum width of 300px. 1990s responsive design.

I got my start cutting HTML in the late 90s. I worked for a development company that had partnered with various design agencies. The design agencies would produce the mock-ups of the website in Photoshop and throw them across to us at the development agency to turn into websites.

I would get the templates, use the guides tool to mark out where where the slices would be for the tables then get to cutting. You got quite adept at being able to look at a design and figure out where the spacer gifs would go, where repeating background images would go etc. Everything was laid out using nested tables (and I started with Dreamweaver but at some point just stopped using the "split" view that it had and used it only as an IDE).

Once converted to HTML templates it was then plugged into a custom CMS along with any additional programming that might be needed for it. We actually hosted a payment gateway for credit card payments that customers could use. Almost a prototype version of Stripe.

The whole process was very assembly line driven:

PSD Designs > HTML templates > CMS integration > Custom development > Deployment

I know this is tongue in cheek, but I was there and I hated all the really bad design. Now things are so cool I find myself clicking on plain text because it might be a link. Somewhere in between is where we need to end up.

DHTML was dynamic HTML IIRC. I don't think it has gone away, we just don't have a name for it now because it is standard practice to modify the DOM using javascript (for better or worse)

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.

>Where are the browser games built with Html5

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?

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.)

You mean, something like https://www.masswerk.at/JavaPac/LostInMaze.html ? :-)

- rounded corners with images

- searching for random Perl scripts to FTP into your cgi-bin folder

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.

Completely off the point, but how many other 90s developers feel like failures for not being millionaires or billionaires by now?

OMG! Me

Not me.

You need more than web-dev skillz to become a millionaire. If you want to be a millionaire, then you have to focus all of your attention on becoming a millionaire. Apart from single-minded focus, you also need certain other personal attributes - ruthlessness, an interest in running a business, and an eye for the main chance (a.k.a. "luck").

These aren't the attributes of your typical web-dev.

Small nitpick, DHTML is Dynamic HTML, not Distributed HTML.

ImageMaps to make a single image have clickable hotspots... did lots of those. You didn't have to worry about cellphones so you could have a 800px wide menu that's an image with hotspots, looked great.

I find it insane how much work I still have to do to figure out positioning on a web page (I don't do much design these days).

Maybe tables weren't the best, but they were easy and predictable.

Missing in that list: the amusing Javascript right-click disabling.

Fighting "right-clicker mentality" before NFTs were even a thing!

Some pages still do that - luckily I have this add-on nowadays: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re-enable-rig...

Very satisfying when you can bypass such useless "protections"

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.

And starting the HTML with  and thousand empty lines, and hoping no one notices that they can scroll down

My first job as a UX designer was at a company named Mindybody.

You might not have heard of it, however, they are the world’s largest provider of scheduling software for Yoga studios (they process billions of dollars in sales every year).

I was their first designer and I redesigned their mobile apps and tablet point-of-sale apps (both are modern and decently well designed native apps), however, even today Mindbody still uses most of the stuff in this article for their web experience! It hasn’t changed since they built it in 2008.

Here is an example (close the ad for the mobile app to see the site):

https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/asp/su1.asp?tg=&vt=&lvl=&...

Every time I apply for a job I worry they will think this is my work. [1]

[1] Technically I did design this desktop mobile app. The very first job I had was to adjust the colors and font sizes and replace out gifs on these pages (but the engineers and myself were not allowed to replace any of the underlying html/tables or the VB script that powers — besides a few minor tweaks).

It’s referenced in the 1x1 gif, all website layout was made with tables. And the 1x1 gif allowed to set very narrow columns/rows, which could be made to look like borders, with images as the round corners.

Also the ubiquitous visitor counter, uploading assets with ftp, cgi-bin, styling in html, animated gifs, midi soundtracks, “in construction” signs, random links to pages the “webmaster” liked.

What about the thing that we for some reason slapped on there with pride? "Made with notepad". Remember those buttons/ribbons?

Well, that one seems kinda legit: "I know HTML well enough not to need a site generator", is what it actually boasts. Why shouldn't one be proud to be able to say that?

I can’t believe I’m the first one to post https://html5zombo.com

I still convert {' '} to   every time I see it in the code base.

A lot of fond memories from the 90s bubble. I love me some coldfusion and ftp and occasionally think how easier it was in some ways.

I also like to say theres not a unicorn today I couldn't have founded if I'd had the idea or insight at the time - plus motivation, money etc. Hindsight and all that.

This is probably a bit after the 90s but for some reason young me got incredibly excited when I learned about the voice-family CSS hack. Simultaneously it felt like such a brilliant hack to leverage poor CSS parsers of the day, and yet the mere existence of voice-family felt like an early glimpse of a futuristic audio browser.

I would add:

  - messing with the mouse  pointer (and adding animated graphics following it), 
  - changing the whole browser’s window’s “chrome” to custom graphics (as in: custom minimize/maximize/close buttons and the edge graphics of the floating window)
  - Maybe throwing full-screen to maximize the impact.

> spacer.gif

Guilty

Guilty (habitual offender)

I remember using spacer.gif a lot back then.

I expected the part about buttons to talk about mouseovers. That was wizardry back in the day, making 3D-shaded buttons that animated as when the cursor was over them, and then changing color or something when you clicked. Impressed the hell out of people.

I gave crazy demos of embedded graphical links with cut-out pop-up targets and pie menus to Bill Joy and Steve Jobs in October 1988. They each had very different reactions!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17109221

DonHopkins on May 19, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...

>Here’s a demo of HyperTIES with pop-out embedded menus:

>HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing: Demo of NeWS based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

>A funny story about the demo that has the photo of the three Sun founders whose heads puff up when you point at them:

>When you point at a head, it would swell up, and you pressed the button, it would shrink back down again until you released the button again.

>HyperTIES had a feature that you could click or press and hold on the page background, and it would blink or highlight ALL of the links on the page, either by inverting the brightness of text buttons, or by popping up all the cookie-cut-out picture targets (we called them “embedded menus”) at the same time, which could be quite dramatic with the three Sun founders!

>Kind of like what they call “Big Head Mode” these days! https://www.giantbomb.com/big-head-mode/3015-403/

>I had a Sun workstation set up on the show floor at Educom in October 1988, and I was giving a rotating demo of NeWS, pie menus, Emacs, and HyperTIES to anyone who happened to walk by. (That was when Steve Jobs came by, saw the demo, and jumped up and down shouting “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat. That sucks!”)

>The best part of the demo was when I demonstrated popping up all the heads of the Sun founders at once, by holding the optical mouse up to my mouth, and blowing and sucking into the mouse while secretly pressing and releasing the button, so it looked like I was inflating their heads!

>One other weird guy hung around through a couple demos, and by the time I got back around to the Emacs demo, he finally said “Hey, I used to use Emacs on ITS!” I said “Wow cool! So did I! What’s was your user name?” and he said “WNJ”.

>It turns out that I had been giving an Emacs demo to Bill Joy all that time, then popping his head up and down by blowing and sucking into a Sun optical mouse, without even recognizing him, because he had shaved his beard!

>He really blindsided me with that comment about using Emacs, because I always thought he was more if a vi guy. ;)

Here's a paper about HyperTIES and its embedded text and graphical menus, pie menus, and emacs authoring tool, that we made in the late 80's at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

Yes, I remember all these :)

I recall also using 1x1 transparent gif for advertising purposes but can't recall exactly why.

Also using curved transparent gif images to give a rounded corner effect on elements using table cells for the corners. Very tedious and also not supported by IE at the time, had to use some funky IE workaround. Now solved by border-radius.

Also using uppercase for all html elements <TABLE> <FONT> etc. I think it was part of XHTML(?) can't recall. We would also run all our pages through an XHTML validator to check for syntax issues.

Also using flash swf files to enable custom fonts. There was some really genius workarounds in those days to implement features we now take (somewhat) for granted.

> To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements.

I'm confused, even considering this is a <2014> article, so before the flexbox alignment goodies, one always was a vertical-align and a forced display table from aligning stuff vertically.

Discussed at the time (of the article):

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7300429 - Feb 2014 (394 comments)

The comments on this page are very clearly divided between people who at the time were professional web developers and people who were teen code explorers, and I love them both.

I never thought I'd feel nostalgic for that time in my life.

I was an explorer at that time. I made documentation websites for my own fantasy novel and took screenshots of SNES emulators that I'd turn into table-based websites. Nostalgia indeed.

Took me a career in corporate finance to realise I should probably go back to playing with computers again, love every minute of it.

This makes me feel old. But also glad. I'm glad I experienced web dev before the current pile of abstractions, painful convenience tools and frameworks were lumped upon us. It was fun back then. Now it's a pain.

I mean nothing is stopping you just using CSS, JS and HTML in 2021.

Well except the anguished screams of your react loving co-workers.

All looks very similar to the pages I write today.

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.

My team was ride or die with (pre-Macromedia) HomeSite!

Oh God and MS Visual Source Safe.

I loved Adobe Pagemill myself.

I remember when Aldus and Macromind merged.

I can't believe Adobe was allowed to merge with Macromedia.

This doesn't even get into the really good stuff like webrings. In the days before Google and SEO, you needed to be part of some "webring" of related sites if you wanted someone to find your page.

They get a brief mention:

> [88x31 pixel buttons] told the tale of all the battles the individual had fought in order to get to where they were today. In other words, which editor (FrontPage ‘98, obviously), which web server (GeoCities, you moron), and which web ring you were a part of (whichever listed your site highest, which was none of them).

One of my first websites used the single pixel GIF for layout, which still works. The website for a snowboarding magazine was intended to symbolise the curved slalom of descending a slope, and was a nightmare in absolute positioning:

https://i.imgur.com/QVcAYqf.png

https://i.imgur.com/2SDxhii.png

https://i.imgur.com/ZBEk9ae.png

My contributions to the nostalgia parade:

- http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html

- http://blooberry.com/indexdot/css/index.html

- https://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/www/cgic.html

And I haven't really done any web programming since cgic days, thankfully.

Ah this brings back memories, and so do many of the anecdotes in this thread.

I remember trying these tricks for my Pokémon site hosted on Angelfire. Great fun as a 10 year old, I even started making my own animated gifs.

The page is still up, with this being the latest announcement: I still need a JAVA person and desperately need more webmasters!!! So if you wan't to help me e-mail

Crypto Twitter is very bullish on Web3 being the resurgence of this type of mentality. Fun and accessible technology that has the potential to mature into something powerful. I can’t help but agree.

One thing a miss: a simple, easy to use, wysiwyg html editor. Also, these days it also would have to be open source. So, my only options look like bluegriffon, whose license/monetization I don't like, or Mozilla Composer (actually seamonkey), which seems basically abandoned in terms of features and maintenance seem to only make it compile and run on modern system.

Some people may suggest a CMS, but I don't want a CMS. I just want a simple way to create a personal page. What alternative still remains?

The problem with wysiwyg is that I think CSS makes it hard to make these things.

Those editors always seemed to make the kludgiest CSS because the CSS 'cascade' makes it hard to create drag and drop components.

Any one more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm wrong.

The hardest problem is wysiwyg for different screen sizes

Ohh yeah.

Couldn't they do it with media queries?

Something like Hugo, I guess, though it's not WYSIWYG. But I don't think a WYSIWYG editor would cope with today's websites too well.

Back in the day everyone viewed your website on a desktop computer, in something around 1024x768 resolution, and if you designed for that then you were fine for most readers. Now, most people will be viewing it on a mobile device, with twice the resolution than it actually appears, and a huge range of possible aspect ratios. There's no WYSIWYG tool that can handle this easily.

Fortunately, there are lots of really simple ways to host your personal page now. From Github/lab pages, to Cloudflare pages, to AWS S3 buckets, there's a huge range of hosting options.

I've used Hugo via Gitlab pages, and it worked really well. Especially because free (as in beer).

This was a typo, I am sure

DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”, was the final feather in our cap of web development tools.

Nice that in 2021 we are thinking so much about decentralized systems though :)

“Dynamic” btw

My first web dev job was to make a java applet (yes) which showed a spider moving up and down on a web. Animated GIFs weren't a thing back then (like 1996 maybe?) so people who went to our website and waited around long enough for it to load over S L O W internet were completely astounded to see something moving. It was black magic.

Blink and marquee tags were the devil though. People who used those should still feel ashamed of themselves.

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.

I remember that site.

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.

You just described building blocks of modern newsletter. In 2021 Outlook is still a thing and renders newsletters using outdated Word HTML engine.

Does anyone remember what the name of that guy was who made fonts, in particular a really nice pixel font, who had a pretty funny site including the adventures of Boxlor? I remember loving his site and can't remember his name for the life of me.

Also, I certainly always had a spacer.gif and ya, my only style was indeed to remove underlining links and my only JS was often only for image rollovers.

The best thing back then (as a young adult with too much time) was how easy you could hack a lot of the online forums or servers.

searching altavista for phpbb forums using a version vulnerable to a given exploit or using cross site scripting waiting for someone to bite it, and then upload 99 shell everywhere you would gain access.

It really felt like having superpower.

Note the upper case HTML. Not sure when we stopped doing them, but they were everywhere.

Also: clan websites with tiny (pixel) fonts. This was early 2000s and we did font-size 8 or 9 px, because it looked cool.

Of course, the horror were drop shadows as images in a table layout. I was so happy when CSS had drop shadows and you didn’t need image files and ugly markup anymore.

Good times.

A nice trip down memory lane. I remember building a site using tables and images to create a rounded border effect

Fun times!

https://web.archive.org/web/20051119043111/http://whistlebum...

who remembers 88x36 button banners? You could approach any webmaster in your niche and exchange such banners. Fun times.

A great example page http://vcfmw.org/

As a backend developer - I literally still use   when I’m forced to touch something on the front end

Genuine question: what's the problem with  ?

Nothing wrong with using it to actually prevent word breaks (i.e. "Hacker News"). It's just not the best method to position things on the page.

Don't forget slicing images for dropshadows and rounded corners.

And the real pros used dithered transparend gifs.

For everyone curious about DHTML, IE5 plus had this “dhtml behaviors” stuff that let one implement reusable components of markup and js. It was actually pretty cool at the time. I worked on a project upgrading an IE7 spa in 2016, from behaviors to angular.

Can we also include Macromedia[1] and Flash? Ahh remember the days of those beautiful intro website animations?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromedia

I call mine p.gif.

I still use one today, because, in order to maintain the Any Browser promise, I use an XHR request for pre-XHR browsers, which just sets the src of the spacer gif.

If any return values are needed, they're populated into the src attribute with a redirect. :)

Holman was one of the first authors that did humor and tech together (at least that I can remember) and he completely changed what I thought a good tech article should be. He was/is a great engineer, but he’s an even better communicator.

Notepad, alt-tab, F5. Perl that produced JS that posted back to the Perl app. Java applets. C++ ISAPI filters on MS side and a single Sun server for ~3000 client sites. Duke Nukem or Quake until 10pm after work. What a special time.

  has made a big comeback in the era of jsx, which truncates white space around elements and interpolated expressions. I prefer it over an interpolated blank space {" "} since it seems a little easier to read.

I love this. All the talk of low-code-no-code now have never heard of FrontPage 98.

I remember my reaction the first time I looked at some code produced by FrontPage: "what the fuck?"

Like others have mentioned, the volume of useless code produced by those visually-driven HTML editors was ridiculous. Took forever to sort through it when the same thing could be accomplished with just a few lines.

I know. It was terrible, verbose. But it could create with ease all of the features mentioned in this post. Those were simpler times.

Drop shadows, rounded corners, the holy grail layout, optimized for 800x600, 960.css, print stylesheets, flash files, the advent of promises...

We didn't start the fire, it was always burning while the beachball was turning.

Somewhat related to the 90s web. Here's the aesthetics of the buttons, title bar and dropdown menu during those days. https://jdan.github.io/98.css/

View source on this HN thread will reveal the wonderful use of <center> and <table> for layout. One of those tags is technically deprecated but in practice both enjoy near 100% browser support.

Because I saw an example of it in the post, what's the right way to handle special characters in script tags? Browsers seem to let you do anything, but stray ampersands are sort of illegal?

If you write HTML, only </script> will end the Javascript parsing and make the parser go back to parsing HTML. This is the only thing you need to escape if it appears in the Javascript code (by using something like '<' + '/script>' for instance). You CANNOT escape special HTML characters (&, <, >) because the parser is interpreting Javascript code, not HTML (but still looking for </script>).

If you write XHTML, special HTML (XML) characters in <script> MUST be escaped. You can avoid having to escape manually by putting your Javascript between <![CDATA[ and ]]>. That's because the XML parser does not have special handling of script tags, contrary to HTML, and will not forgive any unescaped special character. It will parse them as tags and entities if they happen to be syntactically valid XML tags or entities.

If you write polyglot HTML / XHTML, CDATA sections will not handled as such by the HTML parser and will break your javascript because <![CDATA[ will be parsed as Javascript, and that does not work. But you can put them in javascript comments, like this:

    <script>
    // <![CDATA[
    let your_code = "be here";
    // ]]>
    </script>

(you will also need to "escape" both "</script>" and "]]>" if they ever appear in the Javascript code).

In XHTML mode, the Javascript will look like this after parsing:

   // 
   let your_code = "be here";
   //

(because CDATA are interpreted in XML, and "replaced" by their content)

In HTML mode:

    // <![CDATA[
    let your_code = "be here";
    // ]]>

(because CDATA sections are not recognized, so they will be handled as normal commented javascript code)

Aw man I remember Dyanamic Drive. I wasn’t alive in most of the 90s but when I was playing around with HTML as a kid, Dynamic Drive was the coolest website around. It was like NPM in 2007.

We need to figure out some sort of fireball-trail equivalent for touchscreens. Hope Apple/Samsung invest billions into detecting a hovering finger so we can finally have this!

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”

sounds more like "dynamic" HTML

and it still exists today except we just call it "javascript" or maybe "front-end web development"

I still remember a DHTML folder tree view, it was quite popular.

> <style type="text/css">

> <!--

> a:hover {text-decoration: none; color: #000000}

> -->

> </style>

The <!—- —> wrapping the inline CSS made me chuckle. The first CSS hack in the history.

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 still use the 1-pixel (8-bit PNG), in my native swift client development. It's a cheap way to reserve a space for programmatically-set images.

I clicked in hoping to see some tacky background tiles.

"1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it is the only way to vertically center elements."

I miss when about: pages were useful and universal. Nowadays every browser has their own internal scheme and have dropped about:

1999: https://www.atomicsky.com/

I’d add to the list VBScript and hidden iframes to do what Ajax made easier… great times. RIP FrontPage.

"Distributed HTML"? I thought DHTML meant "Dynamic HTML"?! Or is he being sarcastic?

I think most of us just get certain linguistic grooves worn in our brains or maybe it's just muscle memory because yes, it's "dynamic".

The fun of DHTML menus and your Homestead website, complete with neon green hit counter and guest book.

Was just thinking the other day I miss the title "webmaster," made one feel important. ;-)

> It had Active Desktop. It had Channels.

I remember playing with Active Dekstop as a kid, but what were channels?

Basically widgets you could place on your Windows 98 desktop; could be used for weather, stocks, news, whatever.

Probably best-known for being the default ad deployment on the Windows 98 desktop.

Wow, dynamic drive. I thought that was like the coolest site on the planet when I was a kid.

Ah, yes. I remember when PHP was still called PHP3, and that was also the file type suffix.

I thought DHTML stood for "dynamic html", not "distributed html"?

You thought correctly. The D is for dynamic, not distributed.

I write maybe three lines of html per year...

I still start writing everything in UPPERCASE.

The backwards compatible comment tags around scripts and styles. Lol

Placing table tags beside or below parent tags rendered differently.

I remember iepngfix.htc. Glad that whole thing's over.

Oof, the PTSD is real.

This is the peak of my HTML knowledge. I feel called out

Hmm, I always thought DHTML was Dynamic HTML

And websites made with Macromedia Flash...

haha this reminds me of when I started to see HTML in high school, fun times

Who remembers the Xerox PARC Map Viewer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer

>Xerox PARC Map Viewer was one of the earliest static web mapping sites, developed by Steve Putz in June 1993 at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The Xerox PARC Map Viewer was an experiment in providing interactive information retrieval, rather than access to just static files, on the World Wide Web.

>Map Viewer used a customized CGI server module written in Perl. Map images were generated in GIF format from two server side programs. MAP-WRITER created the raster images from the geographic database and RASTOGIF would convert the raster image into the GIF format.

And who remembers Metricom Ricochet wireless spread spectrum radio modems?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

>Ricochet was one of the pioneering wireless Internet access services in the United States, before Wi-Fi, 3G, and other technologies were available to the general public. It was developed and first offered by Metricom Incorporated, which shut down in 2001. The service was originally known as the Micro Cellular Data Network, or MCDN, gaining the Ricochet name when opened to public use.

>History

>Metricom was founded in 1985, initially selling radios to electric, gas, oil, and water industrial customers. One of its founders and its first President was Dr. David M. Elliott. Another of its founders was Paul Baran. Paul Allen took a controlling stake in Metricom in 1997. Service began in 1994 in Cupertino, California, and was quickly deployed throughout Silicon Valley (the northern part of Santa Clara Valley) by 1995, the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area by 1996, and to other cities throughout the end of the 1990s. By this time, the original network had been upgraded, via firmware improvements, to almost twice its original throughput, and was operating at roughly the speed of a 56 kbit/s dialup modem; in addition, Ricochet introduced a higher-speed (nominally 128 kbit/s, in practice often faster) service in 1999; monthly fees for this service were more than double those for the original service.

>At its height, in early 2001, Ricochet service was available in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City and surrounding New Jersey, Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Over 51,000 subscribers paid for the service. In July 2001, however, Ricochet's owner, Metricom, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down its service. Like many companies during the dot-com boom, Metricom had spent more money than it took in and concentrated on a nationwide rollout and marketing instead of developing select markets.

>Ricochet was reportedly officially utilized in the immediate disaster recovery situation of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, partially operated by former employees as volunteers, when even cell phone networks were overloaded.

And who remembers the Metricom / Xerox PARC Map Viewer Mash-Up, a decade before Google Maps?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19173570

>Remember Xerox PARC's map viewer, developed by Steve Putz in June 1993, running on a SparcStation 2?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC_Map_Viewer

>There was a way to embed maps in a web page and provide a bunch of points of interest to overlay on the map.

>Metricom was using it to provide coverage maps of their pole top box locations, for their spread spectrum wireless mesh radio network (it was rolled out in the Bay Area around 1994-1996 or so).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

>I remember being impressed by how cool and powerful (and generous) it was for one web site like Xerox PARC's map viewer to provide dynamic map rendering services for other web sites like Ricochet's network coverage map!

>Then a decade later, along came Google Maps in 2005.

>Also:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020623093514/http://www2.parc....

>A particularly innovative use of the map service is the U.S. Gazeteer WWW service created by Brandon Plewe [Plew1]. It integrates an existing Geographic Name Server with the PARC Map Viewer. A user simply enters a search query (e.g. the name of a city, county, lake, state or zip code) and a list of matching places is returned as a formatted HTML document. Selecting from the list generates another HTML document consisting of two maps (small and large scale) with the location highlighted (using the Map Viewer's mark option). The server in New York does not generate or retrieve the map images, since they are references directly to the HTTP server at Xerox PARC. The user's WWW browser retrieves the map images from the server in California and displays the complete document to the user.

>Documentation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080621011940/http://www2.parc....

>FAQ:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080420130346/http://www2.parc....

>Details:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080608142726/http://www2.parc....

>/mark=latitude,longitude,mark_type,mark_size place a mark on the map. ",mark_type" (1..7) and ",mark_size" (in pixels) are optional. multiple marks can be separated by ";" (see example below).

>/map/color/mark=37.40,-122.14;21.35,-157.97 Specifies marks for Palo Alto, California and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

One cool feature of the early Ricochet modems was that they supported the Hayes command set, and you could issue a command that listed the names of all the other radio modems and pole top radios that were within range. With that knowledge, you could issue the command "ATDT<name>" and connect directly to another modem or pole top box, and then issue remote commands to it, asking it to list out other radios it could see, and explore the network hop by hop!

You could also find those names and locations on the map mash-up, when they later published it, but that took all the fun of hacking out of it. But they eventually disabled those discovery features, and locked the network up more securely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376655

>EvanAnderson 8 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: We may soon have city-spanning 900 MHz mesh networ...

>I am reminded of the old Ricochet network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(Internet_service)

http://daedalus.cs.berkeley.edu/talks/retreat.6.96/Metricom....

>It was an idea ahead of its time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531884

>creeble on Sept 19, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: LoRa Range Testing in San Francisco

>Anyone remember Metricom?

>900mhz, miles of range, dial-up modem speeds.

>hhshephard on Sept 19, 2016 [–]

>Yes, yes indeed. Changed my life in 1998 when I no longer had to be in the office when on Pager Duty. Just velcroed a ricochet modem to my laptop and I was good to go from anywhere. We kind of take that convenience for granted these days.

Metricom's radio modems were based on spread spectrum radio technology invented by Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum#Invention_of_f...

>During World War II, Golden Age of Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil developed an intended jamming-resistant radio guidance system for use in Allied torpedoes, patenting the device under U.S. Patent 2,292,387 "Secret Communications System" on August 11, 1942. Their approach was unique in that frequency coordination was done with paper player piano rolls - a novel approach which was never put into practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

>At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Antheil

>In 1941, Antheil and the actress Hedy Lamarr developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used a code (stored on a punched paper tape) to synchronise random frequencies, referred to as frequency hopping, between a receiver and transmitter. It is one of the techniques now known as spread spectrum, widely used in telecommunications. This work led to their being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

the most nostalgic thing for me was the html comment within the style tag

> DHTML, which stands for “distributed HTML”,

Nope. It stands for Dynamic HTML.

Also: Dreamweaver

not_a_virus.hta

(2014)

Why'd you submit this?

Flagging for clickbait title.

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