Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

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Basically, it was easier. Or even... barely even possible to do what you describe. Maybe you could, but it would have been nightmarish whack-a-mole, and a good chance that the next update to any given browser would break it completely.

In ‘05, you had IE6, plenty of folks still on IE5, IE5 for Mac was still in use (don’t be fooled by the name - it did not behave like IE5 on windows), safari was 2.0, respectable but still a minority browser, and Firefox was on 1.0. Plenty of folks were still on Netscape navigator, which by that point was actively decomposing.

IE6 was what you built for, as it was the majority browser by a country mile. Transparency was hit and miss. Alpha PNGs just weren’t supported, you had to hack them in via JS.

Most websites were laid out using <table>. Using a <div> was new and exotic.

Oh, and you could only do custom fonts using… flash. sIFR, if you want to delve into the hell that was web dev back then. Most folks would just end up with TNR. Transparency on sIFR you could only achieve by replicating your background into the SWF, and good luck getting it to line up.

So. Support an absolute soup of edge cases across a bunch of different browser engines, and deal with “IT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE IT DID ON THE WEBPAGE” from customers, or just do it server side.

Also, it was perfectly acceptable to wait for a website to load - 50% of the U.S. was still on dialup, and “broadband” was commonly 512k.

Oh yeah, I forgot what the table layout stuff used to be like. Since the back has a shine gradient across the back, each position would need all the possible characters. iirc, in that period an article on A List Apart [0] proposed something like that. I think they were doing curved box corners and sending all corners in the same file and using background positioning to only show the portion of the image depicting that corner. As I scan the article it is heavy on CSS positioning, which is used in the demo but I recall IE5 had quirks.

How true to period is the demo? I see in the source "I've tried to preserve the core of this code as it was when I wrote it in June 2005." but most of the page is a static image in the background.

0. https://alistapart.com/article/sprites/

The demo is taken from the archive of my work back then, so it’s all true to that period.

On my site it shows a static background image just to give the demo something contextual to play against. On the actual site the page was obviously all live HTML.

I remember transparency was handled with gifs back then, which had their own problems and limitations.

Alignment was either done via position: absolute or by using a table. The animated background here would be a bit more complicated with a table.

Risk of it breaking with some upgrade, or looking different for some people? As you said, very likely.

So server-side image generation was indeed the best option. And it was a popular and widely solved problem, even in the 90s: visit counters that showed the visits in the shape of an image were super popular.

Yeah, transparency on gifs is binary, so you always had a crunchy edge. Plenty of use cases, but nice looking text wasn't one of them.

And position: absolute did not behave the same way across IE, NN, FF, or safari.

For some reason I feel the sudden urge to have a drink.

Just don't tell the kids about how eCommerce used to work. Credit card number in an email, courtesy of Mal's eCommerce? Pretty much industry standard. shudders, swigs

Yes, you could have done similar with GIFs already with Netscape 3 and IE 3 (I think, IE 3.1, or was this just the Mac version?). "Dynamic HTML" with z-layering became a thing with Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 4.0, which became available in Summer/Fall 1997. With this, relative positioning and proportional text (at variable character width) wouldn't have been a problem.

(With the NS/IE 3 generation, you would have been limited to lines of prepositioned fixed-width characters in a table. So, not really applicable for this.)

I think, the decisive factor may have been badly managed CRTs tending to display greys with a somewhat reddish hue (esp. on Windows, not so much on Macs with a screen gamma of 1.8) and JPEGs generally enjoying better color support. (JPEG was displayed at sRGB or at any embedded IEC profile, which wasn't available for GIF, where the effective color was pretty much hit and miss. So, if you had HTML text with a defined hex-color, a GIF of the same color wouldn't match, while a sRGB JPEG would. Matching JPEG and GIF colors would have posed a similar problem. A reddish hue on grey looked kind of cheap and brownish text was probably the last thing Apple would have wanted.)

Lots of things were different on the front end back then:

- IE was an albatross around every web developers neck - Even better browsers like Firefox and Safari had tons of inconsistencies - jQuery and Prototype weren't around yet - CSS is not remotely close to what it is today

Honestly, placing text over an image was a lofty task back then. We used to use lots of images with text as part of the image. Text images and table layouts were two of the main ways to get around all those cross-browser issues.

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