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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure "shaped the Internet" is the right description. These are 10 HTML/CSS hacks that enabled you to work around browser quirks and poor support for certain features.

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If you want to know a JS hack that truly "shaped the Internet", that'd be ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"). It's the origin of AJAX, allowed GMail to dynamically update the mail list, and led to the entire SPA craze.

If you read ancient articles like this one https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/dynamic-page-updat... you can truly see just how much it changed the internet.

Hah I was hoping someone would bring this up..

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

Same - I recall using it heavily in 99. But that was just on one internal app. I admit that I didn't really predict the SPA thing until Google maps came out and really showed how far it could be taken.

I worked for an ISP in the late 90s and we built a call center app using IE6, SSI, XMLHttp and also IE's built in CSS classes that matched the Windows colours to essentially have a UI that looked and felt like a Windows 95 app..

It was completely unnecessary (at least the look and feel part) but the ability to load in new information into the UI without a full refresh was great.

At the time this was running on Apache 1.1 via Perl CGIs and backed by an mSQL database (that was single-threaded!) so we wanted to minimize complex SQL queries as much as possible..

We eventually moved to a system that would batch pre-render customer details and call history to static HTML overnight when our call center was closed, to reduce the startup time of bringing up a customer's info when the agent had them on the phone. Then for that day we'd use XMLHttp to dynamically append new information from the DB (using a limit statement) and then re-build the static files the next night etc..

In hindsight, we did some creative problem solving for a bunch of self-taught 20-year-olds in the 90s.

That one is truly ancient, and unique in that it actually uses XML, and even SOAP, in AJAX calls. (Although the SOAP is mostly a façade and a fancy way to call a function without any arguments.)

Some of them are definitely more "historic" than others.

For instance, #2 (<table>-based layouts) definitely shaped much of early-to-mid-2000s web design, and can be viewed as a precursor to flexbox/other modern layout engines.

Same with sIFR -- custom webfonts are totally taken for granted today largely because of "hacks" like this.

I strongly agree with table layouts being historic. A large reason we now have flexbox is because early CSS was really bad at replicating table-based layouts, so people didn't stop using then despite the drawbacks.

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

I don’t know about others, but I hated sIFR. It was routinely deployed without sane fallback (so that if you didn’t have Flash, headings were broken, for example—it being common to deploy it on headings only, since it was overall so awful), it butchered performance, the rendering was ugly and often difficult to read, and it thwarted regular operations like text selection.

Yeah. I was hoping for a list of hacks that got promoted to standards. That would have been a really cool read.

"list of hacks that got promoted to standards. That would have been a really cool read."

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

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