Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs | Hacker News Reader

Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs

danq.me

149 pointsbirdculture24 comments

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TIL server side image maps: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLImageEl...

Supported since forever.

Wow, I remember when server side image maps were the only kind of image map!

Really? <map> was also supported since Chrome and Firefox 1. Is ismap older yet?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

If I recall, yes. I don't think clientside maps hit till HTML 3.2

Paul Graham's website uses image maps for the nav bar, it's the only place I can recall seeing them off the top of my head.

That one's a client-side image map.

And completely unnecessary. Should be a list of text links.

IIRC the Apple website used to use (client side image maps) them. But I suspect that was Mai my so they could do some research where users actually click on their screen.

fun fact: source maps are used by some Tor onion sites ("dark net") as part of a captcha process without using JavaScript. If you present the user with an image, and ask them to click on a particular part of it, the server can recieve exactly where they clicked and validate if that's correct without using JS at all. (JS is a big no-no on Tor hidden network sites)

That actually makes a lot of sense, and it helps me wrap my head around why the technique exists at all. As someone who didn’t get into web programming until 2015 or so, I didn’t quite understand at first the usefulness of this. But for sites like this built in the 90’s it was a totally different world

There's probably some efficiency to it too. Encoding a dozen images as one and load them in one request will be quicker than 12 separate images each with their own overhead.

The way source maps are used by dark net sites, and the reason it exists, are probably unrelated! I think it was just an early form of using image tiling for big efficiency gains. Now with HTTP2/QUIC you can request many small individual images without much overhead, but back the day there were huge gains by sending one larger image instead of 50 smaller ones. (There's also the pure CSS solution used with image sprites that's between the old web and the current era, but I digress)

When I was a kid I had a Geocities-style website hosted on hpg.com.br which was wholly composed of animated GIFs, mostly Pokemon-related.

Very unfortunate that archive.org doesn't have a copy of it.

Whoa. I remember using client-side image maps in web design in the 90s, although once Photoshop introduced slices (<table> with rollover javascript hovers inlined in your html!), it mostly put an end to that.

I never heard of anyone, ever, using server-side image maps. Not with an Apache server, anyway. Maybe once something with Adobe ColdFusion.

I wonder whether this was sort of am ad-hoc copy protection scheme for these icons?

I will occasionally mentor folks of varying ages.

They usually end up talking to me because some project or career path they were on didn't work out how they were expecting.

I mention this b/c at some point I ask them: "Hey, do you have a blog post or website about this failed project?"

They usually say "yes, but who would want to hear about this??"

Me: "You would be ASTOUNDED at what people find interesting. Success or failure, there is always something to be learned from someone else trying to solve a problem."

Hopefully, we see more of these writeups as they are VERY inspirational (successful stories like this one or not)

https://ibiblio-icon-archive.danq.dev/icons/1.html

It'd be nice to have some way to browse the pages without constantly hunting for the Next button.

I agree but there is https://github.com/Dan-Q/ibiblio-icon-archive/tree/main/icon... and then you can put a . (or a .gif) in your OS search box

The title sounds like a line from a KRAZAM video ( e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDr6_cMtfdA )

Very nice collection. Enjoyed the history lesson as well.

... of course.

https://www.ibiblio.org/gio/iconbrowser/icons/icons38.html

I really love that the source-extension icons are all different, and resemble the files contents - .c indentation, .h mostly linear, .s assembly instructions, ".o" bits

Lol at the design decision that the 44x38 penis should naturally expand vertically.

when pixels matter....

i was getting kind of annoyed by all the gender-ism in the first 30 pages... only naked women... this re-balances the equation and i am disarming myself of my pitchfork.

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