Only 90s Web Developers Remember This | Hacker News Reader

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

zachholman.com

710 pointsbado394 comments

> HTML For Dummies doesn't cover the <IMG> tag until chapter four?

Ah yes, HTML For Dummies. For me, the book that started it all. Reading that book during my elementary school Pokemon craze led me to create my first serious website from scratch, Mew's Hidden Lair [1]. Except back then it was Dummies 101: HTML [2]. And I do remember how magical it was to type in that command and see an image of Pikachu show up on my screen.

Reading the article and writing this post has been a serious trip down memory lane. Great, now I'm nostalgic. Back to work I guess...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010518071345/http://www.fortun...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-Tech/dp/0764...

Uh, are you me? My HTML book was a different one, but I definitely had the pokemon[1] thing. All in elementary school. Who knew it would end up being my career?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpag...

I very well could be, considering one of my first experiments was on maxpages also, but I can't remember the name unfortunately (pikachu something?). I remember how ultra-competitive it was to get people to upvote your website so it would get to the maxpages front page and that at one point all the front page links were pokemon websites.

I wonder if there's a safe way an insider from maxpages, coolfreewhatever, trident, geocities, etc. could provide this data maybe by email address without violating the privacy of everyone ever? I have the exact same story, including the hilarious pokemon websites from 2000-2003. Can't remember any of the urls. I don't need backups, just the urls.

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Own-Page---Kids/dp/084317459...

1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.

I feel old now.. in 1998, I was 24 and had been working as a web developer for a couple of years. I'd moved on from any thoughts of Netscape server-side dev, and was doing VBScript and JScript in classic ASP. JS was my favorite language back then, though dealing with MS COM collections was a pain.

I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.

What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.

Same here, I was 22 and finishing my CS degree with lots of experience on side projects and ready to jump into the golden .COM days.

Still after all these years, the scars earned in web development projects, make me jump of joy when I get to do native desktop stuff instead.

That's funny, I actually really like web development... when it comes down to it, it's all hacking, only now you get better levels of abstraction.

It's not nearly as bad as the bad old days so to speak, and a lot of things can be very clean and elegant.

I think one reason for me, is that I am way much better doing pure graphics coding for customs components, than trying to make a component out of <div/> coupled with CSS/JavaScript magic.

God, I started out with Perl-based CGI, NetObjects Fusion, and ATG Dynamo's early JSP implementation, back when being able to afford a SQL backend meant you were hot stuff. Kids today have it so easy. We had to code ISAPI filters, during packet storms, for bidirectional communication! And don't get me started on what we had to do when the bit buckets ran out of ones....

I wrote an Atari 2600 cartridge auction/trading site in perl that was so popular, it caused my company's webserver - a large national ISP! - to slow to a crawl running all the CGI.

This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.

I still lend this book out to friends who want to learn HTML.

My thing was Dragon Ball Z sites. CGI/Perl running NewsPro, links to questionable RealMedia content.

What a sucker I was! Good thing PHP came along and taught us all what true webmastery is.

with all the hate php gets now, people forget how it changed the game back at the turn if the century. it was so easy.

Worms 2, tripod.com, paint shop pro. Can't stop me.

SSI changed my life, and I coded a 50 page website in a textarea. on 28.8. In the snow. Without shoes.

Not much has changed. I use vim now.

I can't happen but notice the "village" button on the bottom on your site. I used to write "news" for that site. I still talk to the original owner of that site today.

ahh... memories :)

I am so, so, so sad that Yahoo! shut down Geocities, because they took with them the Pokemon fan website that I made when I was just learning this whole 'HTML' thing for the first time.

I even remember the exact full URL of the website[0]. But between the demise of Geocities and the demise of my 386's hard drive, that piece of nostalgia is gone forever.

I remember dedicating a page to all of the different "strategies" to catch Mew in Gen I games, before we all collectively decided that this was impossible to do without a Gameshark[1]. Little did we know that there was a technique - it just wouldn't be discovered until ~2003[2]]!

[0] For those just tuning in this century, Geocities would provide webspace (that's a word I haven't used in a while!) and your homepage would be a URL of the format http://www.geocities.com/Foo/Bar/1234

[1] "When I was your age, Action Replay was a Gameshark..."

[2] http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch

have you tried looking for it here?

https://archive.org/web/geocities.php

Unfortunately, it's neither there nor on Reocities. :(

Have you tried changing geocities.com to reocities.com?

There was a huge push on archiveteam to scrape as much as they could before it was shut down. If it was saved it'll have the same url on reocities

This reminded me of my pokemon fan site (Poketown) from 2000.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.o...

Looks like I was a pattern of grid design (ala tables) back then.

Has everyone made a Pokemon site as part of some rite of passage or something? One of the first things I did to teach myself Perl and HTML back in the day was write a Pokedex page.

Maybe Pokemon can be the new Hello World.

I like it! Makes it more interesting than hello world and a little bit of a throwback to the years of yester.

I made a school website instead. It got official and to thank me for the good deed they removed our class from the school history when they build the new website and converted the image archive, because we weren't up to their standard or whatever. Catholics .. gotta love them.

I still remember sitting there hours and days banging my head on the table how to get this school logo exactly in the center at the top of the page where it had to stay visible even if the page was scrolled, because "it has to be up there. And it must be always visible." Fun times.

That's awesome! I remember most pages looked like that back in the day actually. I even offered it as a 'service' to Dragonball Z websites. It existed of just a background image with all the borders/effects in it, and transparent tables on top of it with a content structure just like yours. Good times.

You're not the only one. https://github.com/alaiacano/geocities-theme

A big part of the GeoCities content has been available as a torrent file from a group called the Archive Team and maybe you can still download it:

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities

The file was huge, about several hundred gigabyte. I didn't download it, because I don't have enough space and downloading it would take ages with my slow connection.

On http://reocities.com/ you can browse through some of the old pages and sites, but many things are broken now, missing images.

Geocities was awesome. I used it for an upcoming events website while I was in school. I remember thinking how cool it was when I bought a domain name for the site. When good ol' Geocities went away, it was really sad. Kind of felt like the end of an era.

Luckily the title of babies first scripts as well as annoying autoplay, flashing gifs and terrible layouts had been taken over by tumblr. If you ever feel the need to know why 99% of professional devs aren't 12, check out a couple of "custom" tumblr styles.

I'm surprised Tripod.com is still hosting my Pokemon site, Pikachu's Place [1]! I used take screenshots of episodes by taking pictures of the TV using a digital camera and uploaded them to the site. Hilarious.

Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics!

[1] http://pika299.tripod.com/

Wow, tripod... no pokemon for me (I was a bit too old for that craze), but they are still hosting my site with screenshots for a Quake3 bsp renderer I wrote back then:

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/

And my OpenGL driver for the Genesis engine.. the download zip of source code even still works:

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html

Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.

You had me at Genesis3D. Spent so many hours building levels and things with friends using that.

Jeez, I had a site on Tripod called Pikachu's House of Pokémon. The number of Pokemon fan sites in this HN thread is blowing me away right now.

The one that started it for me was HTML 4 for the World Wide Web; the book's website is a quaint look back at an era of frames and tables for layout: http://www.elizabethcastro.com/html4_4e/

My pages from back then (it must have been 1996 or 1997) were hosted at the local ISP, and they've since disappeared into the mists of time, but I definitely had a <marquee> with other tags nested inside. More importantly, I was making my first forays into programming... in VBScript and JScript. I soon moved on to "real" languages, but now we've come full circle, and JavaScript in the browser is the place to be again.

I got my start from something a bit more modest - the HTML chapter of some Pocket Guide to the World Wide Web. I ate it up. I wrote tonnes of pages.

I remember my dad saying that if I got a domain name and it got popular, I could rake in tonnes from sponsorship. I was amazed. I asked him if he could buy me a domain. He said no :( In fairness, I was only 10...

What's quite funny is that I actually work for a company that has essentially done the above and actually provides a big portion of revenue. The pages are not much better quality either (they need more <blink> tag imo).

Serious deja vu - I must have come across your website at some point. I was also very into the "pokemon sim" craze back in the day. Here's mine:

http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/

What, no mention of _The Whole Internet Catalog_?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and...

Respect.

  <p><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7"></p>
  <!-- lol yeah i'm base64 encoding 1x1.gif isn't that fucking dope? -->

The future is now!

ROFL that's hilarious in so many ways. The 1 pixel gif was used as a cached item... by inlining it as a data image he's making that effort useless. I love this article.

It was more about alignment.

I've done that!

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

False, dynamic vertical centering has always been possible with tables:

  <table><tr>
  <td valign="middle">dynamically vertically centered</td>
  <td><img src="1x1.gif" height="2000" width="1"></td>
  </tr></table>

This is something CSS still can't seem to do dynamically except with table-emulation, which, you know, kind of defeats the whole fucking purpose of CSS (and isn't backwards compatible anyway). Seeing how much people decry tables as the antizalgochrist (guess what zealots: layout divs and lists also aren't semantic) I'm surprised this hasn't been fixed yet. But I don't care anymore since I moved back to app dev and my life got 100x less painful.

Here's something else CSS still can't do AFAIK:

  <table width="80%"><!-- dynamic --><tr>
  <td width="300">fixed"</td>
  <td width="*">dynamic</td>
  </tr><table>

Take a look at flexbox. http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

Vertical centering with CSS, without table emulation: http://jsfiddle.net/mBBJM/1/

IIRC that technique only works with fixed heights so it is useless for most layout scenarios, and is why I specified "dynamic" in my comment.

CSS is perfectly fine for fixed size layouts but it completely sucks for dynamic ones, especially if you want to mix fixed and dynamic elements. Tables OTOH handle these layout scenarios simply, concisely and without hacks.

Fixed widths and heights....it is amazing that [as it seems] no one in the entire w3c or building the browsers know people that write applications for multiple languages, different directional settings (right-to-left vs left-to-right), and even verticalization (replacing terms within the product depending on the customer). Things that are trivial in native applications back in the early 90s still can't be done easily in 2014. Honestly, it is pathetic.

Given that HTML was never designed to be an application development language is that surprising ?. Talk about banging a square peg into a round hole!!!

Javascript was never intended for building large applications, but with the JIT-improvements of the last years, it works.

CSS is really botched and holding us back at this point. Fortunately it is slowly improving (eg. * { box-sizing: border-box } and the flex-box), but still...

Only works if you have a fixed height for what you're centering though.

A quick google reveals this for IE8+ everything else.

http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/

Not terrible but still a hack. Should just be a simple way of doing this by now... Still, this technique is better than a spacer gif!

One pedantic point [what, here on HN??!!] about your statement "layout divs and lists also aren't semantic"... the difference is that divs are never semantic, and they're not supposed to be. Whereas table are semantic and impart meaning on what the kind of content is. So, yeah, divs aren't semantic and that's exactly why they're more appropriate than tables for layout.

I hear the argument that <table>s should only hold tabular data, but (a) that is a convention not a rule and (b) frankly content and layout are so horribly muddled in HTML that I believe in a pragmatic approach with clean, minimal, backwards-compatible code and no fragile hacks. If that means using a couple of layout tables then so be it.

What really grates is that the same people will then often use a <ul> to make a hover menu, which is completely hypocritical.

Try loading that website in a text only browser. All of a sudden those ul>li navigations start to make sense.

Accessibility anyone?

I do:

    .thing {
      position: relative;
    }
    .thing .child {
      width: 50px;
      height: 50px;
      position: absolute;
      top: 50%;
      margin-top: -25px; /* half of height */
    }

Or else if it's text I just make the line-height the same height as the parent element. That keeps things vertically centred :)

-- Here's something else CSS still can't do AFAIK:

-- <table width="80%"><tr>

-- <td width="300">fixed"</td>

-- <td width="*">dynamic</td>

-- </tr><table>

Actually, it can. I did it for you:

Image: http://i.imgur.com/l5GPLNC.png

Source: https://gist.github.com/Imdsm/9226944

One more without calc for older browsers:

.container {width: 80%;} .left {float:left; width: 300px; background: yellow;} .right {margin-left: 300px; background: red;}

I thought DHTML was "dynamic" HTML, as made popular by the Dynamic Duo:

http://grox.net/doc/web/javascript/dynduo/

  ns4 = (document.layers)? true:false
  ie4 = (document.all)? true:false

  if (ns4||ie4) document.writeln('<DIV ID="bulge"><IMG SRC="bulge.gif" WIDTH=49 HEIGHT=148 BORDER=0></DIV>')
  else alert("You must have Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0\nto view the examples in this site.")

I remember using layers. I was in primary school at the time.

You are correct, it was, as my dog-eared copy of O'Reilly's doorstop on the subject (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565924949.do) can attest.

Hey, there's another one for the list: only '90s web developers know what it's like to have to learn new technologies by going to Barnes & Noble and buying a book about them.

Really? I learned about NCSA httpd from the online documentation at hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu and talking to one of the authors. Granted, I was at UIUC at the time, and knew some of the Mosaic developers as well. ;)

Oh god, I still have my Javascript 1.2 book. =/

Part of me wants to build a bonfire and toss it on. The other part of me goes, "But that's a book. A completely useless except as a curiosity for historians book, but still a book."

It's not too far off. I've got the same one, and it's the only JavaScript book I've got!

Buy books?! who the hell does that. No, you would go to Barnes and Noble, or Borders, find a nice comfy chair and read until your eyes bled. You justified it by reminding yourself that the book was already obsolete from the moment it was printed so you didn't need to buy it, anyway.

This is so true.

I remember learning Java from a book, and many of my lightbulb moments about programming came from reading code, not writing it.

... and Dynamic Drive I guess? http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ :)

OMG... Dynamic Drive was pretty much my go to JavaScript hack site. Oh the frustration when taking two little snippets and finding out they were not compatible with each other. And then the elation when you managed to rewrite them to make them work together.

EDIT: Holy crap... I still have the bookmark for DD (and JavaScript Kit at the old http://www.wsabstract.com domain) in an "Imported" bookmarks folder in Chrome. I'm not sure how many browsers those have been through over the years.

and then to see one of the browsers go down in flames after all the efforts.

But you gained a lot of arcane knowledge in the end, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.infosystems.www...

It was a joke related to everyone falling over themselves now for distributed anything in the way that everyone fell themselves for anything dynamic back in the day.

We weren't web developers back then, we were webmasters

Well the postmaster looked after sendmail, that being the old word for the man in charge of the post office. The hostmaster looked after DNS because it rhymed, and they needed a word for the guy who looked after the website.

It was a very different meaning from today's "rockstar ninja".

And if you ever ran into an error message on the web you would just contact the webmaster. Problem solved.

and we didn't build a website, we built a homepage.

I thought homepage was just whatever page you had your browser set to start up on. And then some of us built personal home pages that had all the links we cared about on them. And then one of us built Personal Home Pages.

And even if it had CGI, it still wasn't a web app.

Funny. The term is still in use; I think it's usually meant to imply a deeper level of ownership, a la sysadmin. A few times a year people contact me saying they need a webmaster, and the way they describe their needs, I wouldn't say that "developer" really covers it.

To me, the term dev-ops is probably more accurate these days.

Webmaster in a Nutshell [1] was our bible!

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565923256.do

I think only porn sites use that term these days :D

Oh man. I was a "web developer" back then.

- I'm surprised he didn't mention tables. That's the first thing that came to my mind. We didn't use CSS but tables to make a layout. And I have to admit I miss them. Yes we have grid systems like bootstrap now but still, tables were damn easy.

- What about those counters that were displaying how many visitors had came since the website creation

- Those "in construction" pages

- the <s> tag that no one seem to use now, not even in markdown

- the <u>, <b> and <i>.

- XML! And xhtml!!

- flash everywhere

- java application sometimes

- music blasting when you would arrive on a website

- fake iframes or fake images for fake traffic (width="0" height="0")

- gifs everywhere

- fake urls like .fr.fm

- no right clicks allowed

- photoshop design that would get cut in multiple squares and displayed in a table. Fireworks used to do that automatically.

- all those crappy tutorials and all the real "books" I had to buy to learn.

- websites getting upset because of hotlinking

- those "top" websites that would pop in humor websites and where you could vote for the best website.

- <center>:(</center>

- WYSIWYGs!! Do they still exist?

- (in my really early days) using flamingtext.com to make headers

- using as much code from dynamicdrive.com as possible

- .dhtml

- pasting little flourishes like .·. .:· everywhere

- phpBB and invision power board

  > - all those crappy tutorials and all the real "books" I
  >   had to buy to learn.

You didn't use Webmonkey?

Webmonkey was pretty cool back then for sure! Still, nothing beat a good, heavy paper book in my hands.

Oh man disabling right click I forgot about that one. The clients that were really concerned people would try to save images off their website cracks me up today. I can't believe that adding alert('This is copyrighted material.') was something I had to begrudgingly add on a routine basis

How about "WELCOME TO MY SITE" scrolling in the browser statusbar?

Apparently that still works in Safari http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/cut11.shtml

Related Bootstrap theme: http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

Is there a v3 theme? Would love to drop that into our internal system april 1.

I haven't seen the v3 theme, but the v2 one works with moderate success, even on BS3 pages... I actually have this gist lying around (paste in console). https://gist.github.com/brbcoding/37c2ca77a3a368708d24

This is what it does to the BS3 docs page: http://i.imgur.com/VQNlsZy.png

No colored scrollbars? Or was this past 2000?

Come on, that would ruin the user experience

and it is of-course not a part of the Web CSS spec.

Discussion is still going strong in Bugzilla, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790

at least back then people didn't use javascript for styling a scrollbar...

No, but they first used Java applets and then Flash, just to re-implement the native scrollbars with a lesser version. The horror...

Kidding aside, Comic Sans MS is still one of the most easily readable fonts out there.

Apparently the that lower case a in Comic Sans matches how most people write, makes it an easier font for people with poor literacy

This is beautiful.

Is it just me or is that background 3d? That's tripping me out.

That is all Photoshop was used for back in the day.

Noise filter, sheer, blur, fuck with the levels, colorize with a horribly bright shade of something. If you fucked it up bad enough you couldn't tell it wasn't repeating. 90x90 and 120x120 all the way down.

That and making an amazing image with a completely pointless sun glare filter and then cutting the image into cubes so you could display it on the site. Thats how "consultants" overcame HTML limitations for a long ass time.

I can't stop laughing. To say that it is merely extremely accurate would be a travesty of the english language.

lol, fuck. I remember every goddamned thing on that page.

The dude coding in the lower right was a nice touch. Haven't seen that in a long time.

> Have you ever shoved a <blink> into a <marquee> tag? Pixar gets all the accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation. By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer.

Except that blink only existed in Netscape and marquee only existed in IE, and you could not have a webpage with both before around 2004, when firefox got support for marquee. At that point both tags were almost universally despised.

This does not mean I did not tried ;) (back when I was 10 years old, and Webmastering all around and thinking I was awesome)

I have a feeling either Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver had support for using both together in their WYSIWYG editor...

Long before 2004 you could use Opera for that.

Remember when VRML was going to be the next big thing and we were all going to be moving through 3d websites?

It was gonna be just like in Neuromancer. Cyberspace.

I read "cyberspace" as a whisper.

I remember the Cosmo VRML Viewer.

Now, I think WebGL is the new VRML.

I remember when SGI came by to demo their VRML viewer with an animated character. During Q&A I commented that the web made it easy to learn by 'view source'; "how do you do that with VRML?" I remember being dissatisfied with their response. (I think you were supposed to use one of their authoring tools for it?)

Was it Floops?

Whoa! Totally!

Ahh, and I see now why it would have been so hard to author - it was based on motion capture.

Yeah, I was working at a VRML startup at the time and we used Floops to test our code. I probably watched those animations thousands of times...

One of the best things about reading Bleeding Edge this year was reminiscing about VRML.

I worked on a VRML retail store that had 3D products on 3D shelves and 3D customer service reps you could chat with. It was just like shopping in a real world retail store, except you're tripping on LSD flying uncontrollably upside down through a bright colored world of blocks and pyramids while wearing binoculars until you punch a hole in the sky and your browser crashes. The world just wasn't ready to shop in 3D.

That's it. I'm creating a VMRL magento implementation where even the admin panel is in 3d.

I'll fund you on this.

Heh. Dorkbot-SF is having a 20-year anniversary party for VRML, and they just requested VRML files for projection on the walls.

VRML? Bah, back then I was still hoping GopherVR would restore gopher as the primary protocol for the Internet.

(This must be what it feels like to realize you're old...)

Who needs gopher when you can just ftp to places and download lists of what they have? And lists of what they know that other people have.

Hmm, right. That got tiresome after a bit, so "telnet archie.mcgill.ca" and do an archie search.

I remember that by 1992 the index overflowed signed 32 bit int and started giving "-45%" complete.

Of course we're not old. Those were the ones who could replace a VAX disk pack, and who had to log in via dedicated terminals instead of dial-up via a PC. :)

Fuuuuuuck man, anyone remember ActiveWorlds?

Yes. :(

Hard to believe it was 20 years ago.

And that we're finally coming full circle back to it.

Shit, I'm getting old.

First of all DHTML stood for "Dynamic HTML" not "Distributed HTML", and it's not true that "To this day [space gif] is the only way to vertically center elements."

Hey, those are the same two points I came here to say!

Ha, I got to be pedantic first on HN. And it feels good!

woosh

Damn! I'm hours late and I was coming here to be pedantic as well.

Needs a section on the joys of tables.

Possibly my favorite bug ever: HTML has a weird relationship with whitespace; usually it doesn't matter much, except when it does: http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol7/html_no1.htm

This is one of the few bugs I've encountered that still makes me angry to this day. I spent so much time trying to figure it out.

Tables + frames!

Who needs position: fixed when you have frames!?

Nope we still have that with HTML emails.

Ugh.. the rendering bugs.. when combining tables and divs... IE for the longest time had a bug where combining table and div elements nested, when exceeding a certain complexity, you'd just get a white screen... It was fixed in IE6 on XP, but not on earlier versions of windows.

That was a nightmare of support issues on a few apps for me.

Needs a section on the joys of tables.

I don't think you need to be a 90s developer for that. Look at the HTML of the website you're currently using.

IN some ways, I miss those days.

I was already in my 30s and a mainframe programmer back in 97 and jumped into teaching myself Unix and Perl. But also dabbling in VBScript and then later Javascript to write a Age of Empires battle calculator that got decent traffic. And a site dedicated to the computer game, with a Perl forum a cobbled and altered "Matt's WWW Scripts" beauty :) Next, around 99, I discovered PHP (when it was still v3) and built what later peopled termed a blog and CMS. I used it to build another gaming site and a fan site for a radio show that became the "official" site for the program. Later I built upon that custom PHP CMS to make a local news site that got heavy traffic for that age (early 2000s) but later sold my interest in the site (and it went defunct not even a year later).

On my original PHP CMS, I recall first using CSS book by Håkon Wium Lie & Bert Bos, original CSS developers, published back in 97 or 98, to try to go it full CSS back in 2000. It sort of worked, but was brittle. This was a few years before the CSS Zen Garden and advancing browsers quickly dispensed with the old tarted up "table" HTML.

But again, for all the great technological strides made, I miss that age -- it seemed we are all "swimming in one pool" -- and all doing our own thing, building and taming unchartered wilderness. Now, building a website for a "clever idea" seems pointless as everyone's online attention is on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest. Even Wordpress blogs seem to be getting passe. In that time, though, there was an energy and vibrancy on building things. Today it seems all the creative programming chops are directed at building silly social media mobile apps that are not much more than ICQ that can do multimedia.

What about CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive [1] which amazingly is still alive?

[1] http://www.scriptarchive.com/

And updated in 2009!

Along those lines on the design side of things, what about Doc Ozone's tutorials, those are still up too:

http://www.handson.nu/

Incidentally he was also doing some pretty crazy DHTML era stuff on his last home page revision, which, despite the date on the page, I believe came out circa 2001:

http://www.ozones.com/

I was frequenting PerlMonks a lot during the time that Not Matt's Scripts were created: http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net/

Yes yes yes! You were a webmaster based on the article posted.

You were a web developer if you'd torn apart and rebuild Matt's Forum, Poll, and other widgets.

My first job title was "webmaster." Which meant dev-ops-designer-product-guy.

True, true - there was no web dev/web designer, no front end/back end... webmaster had to be a *nix admin, coder, HTML, graphic designer & security guy all rolled into one.

So true. Sometimes I tell the new kids about this in terms of the differences between then and now: "No, you don't understand, I don't know all this shit because I'm awesome, I know all this because getting a computer working and online in the late 80s/early 90s required knowing just about everything. Everything. Right down to when you needed to park the fucking hard drive." It was all one big roll.

I know the long-beards would scoff at that a bit but, you know, it is what it is. Even in the early 90s you had to know almost all facets of things just to get it working.

Hearing "DHTML" reminded me of Thomas Brattli's old site[1] and it's successor dhtmlcentral. I learned quite a bit from those sites in the late 90s early 00s.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20001019064945/http://www.bratta...

Holy shit. That place was a mecca.

I'm blown away this is still around.

I remember colored scrollbars in IE: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ms531155%28v=vs.8...

I think the 90's in web design is like the 80's in fashion.

They are still there. Even WebKit has an implementation, http://css-tricks.com/custom-scrollbars-in-webkit/ .

The request is still being discussed in Bugzilla :) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790

A couple months ago, I decided to write a very short tutorial/introduction to the program `telnet`. I ended up deciding to use the <blink> tag to make a cursor that blinks similar to how it blinks in the terminal.

Hilariously, I discovered that <blink> is actually no longer implemented in Chrome.

The one legitimate use!

I ended up mocking it with JavaScript. EDIT: it's here if you want to see how the cursor turned out! http://blog.nullspace.io/day-208.html

I don't see any cursor blinking in Firefox. :(

Arrrrgh, thanks for pointing it out. I don't use Firefox, and I don't know a damn thing about web programming.

> Hilariously, I discovered that <blink> is actually no longer implemented in Chrome.

There is a solution!

http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html

Do you mean <blink> is no longer implemented in blink?

Damn... I remember learning about yahoo.com for the first time at a Barnes & Nobles when I was actually looking for books about the WWW haha. Two other guys in the same aisle were exchanging bookmarks in person. Anybody else remember writing links down on paper?

Remember when links to individual pages were short enough to memorize without the query string laden beasts we have today?

They weren't short, they were long and had weird characters. You'd have to go to someone's page like http://personal.theisp.net/users/~customername/pg1.htm

And getting paper books that listed interesting web sites.

Yeah, I remember that one kid in school who was 'collecting links'. He wrote them on a notebook and then told other kids about these cool links. Good times :)

I remember writing links on post-it notes and pasting them to the CRT monitor. Even going as far as writing the result URL from Altavista.

This was really funny, thanks! As I finished reading, I realized how ridiculously much I've had to learn over the past ~15 years as a web dev.

Things have changed so much on so many levels. For example, just over the past week, I've had to set up a server, a CI tool, install and configure some databases, built an app using a bunch of different languages, frameworks and whatnot, learn a new language, etc.

The reason I'm saying this is because the number of skills I've acquired so far would have seemed absolutely daunting years ago. A lot of these skills are of course perishable, but the sheer number of concepts you have to keep in mind at any one time when working in web dev is ridiculous (though interesting for the most part).[1]

Over the years I've spoken to a lot of kids who wanted to learn web development, and I'm never quite sure what to say. On one hand I really want them to see how cool it can be, on the other hand I'm always concerned I might scare them when I explain how you achieve cool things.

I love what I do, but if you want to properly understand the tools you're using, web dev isn't for the faint of heart these days.

[1] I'm not saying this doesn't apply to other fields, web dev just happens to be the one I know the best.

If you care about typesetting and legibility, you sometimes really do need  . It prevents the browser from inserting a line break between two words that belong together, like February 26th or Louis XIV. IIRC nbsp is short for non-breaking space.

It was never designed to add arbitrary spacing to your layout, though ;)

To this days I still use it now and then to add a little bit of spacing to inline elements if I am too lazy to have <span>s with margin all over the place.

Stay tuned for episode 2 including:

* Nested table layouts, adventures in collapsed borders

* window.status = "awesome"

* HRs: "I can make a 3d hole in my page"

* document.all being the best DHTML api.

> * window.status = "awesome"

The discovery of window.status was a landmark of human achievement. Scrolling text in the browser's own UI? Sign me up, I'll take 40.

Remember scrolling text in the title tag? Quite cool, back in the era before tabbed browsers.

* Navigation menu using GIF buttons. Often animated, including the rotating "@" symbol for sending mails

* Creating gradient text using one <font color="..."> for each letter. http://jsfiddle.net/A2VCE/

* Putting text in <noscript> and <noframes> tags to support old browsers

* Add "lowsrc" attribute to <img> because the larger image would take too long to load.

* List detailed hardware specs for the web server on the "about us" page.

* Every site had a guestbook, which was displayed as "some text <hr> some text 2 <hr> ..." etc. Centered, of course.

and wide open to the funkiest XSS you can imagine--boy did that ever blow my mind when someone explained me the idea, I had been coding hardcore JS for years but it never clicked that this would allows you to pwn everything. except my mind went more into practical joke settings "hey I can inject JS and make all links on this guestbook EXPLODE if you click them?? aahaha"

And don't forget 2x2.gif, with the top left and bottom right pixel transparent, and the other two pixels coloured white or grey. Used to make background images of table cells with this, and that would create a faux opacity effect with whatever was used as the background image behind the table.

I miss guestbooks. No context, no social media BS, just "say hi or something." I think the first server-side script I ever wrote was possibly the worst guestbook ever in perl on Tripod.

And webrings. Oh god webrings...

Tripod let you run perl scripts?

It was pretty limited, but yes.

All webrings were missing was a HUD. A top-down topographical map of the ring and an indicator of your position in it at any given point would have been awesome.

I almost half think there must be a way to bring them back, but I keep coming around to yet another js widgety social media service thing which would probably just wind up evil.

And people wouldn't even use it because it would probably break their SEO or something. But "I like this site - show me another one like it, but make it go in a circle" seems like an idea that should be able to get traction even now.

Maybe as a browser plugin. I don't know.

I actually considered building a web ring service just for tumblr when it was beginning to get popular. What's old is new again tends to repeat over and over again.

No mention of "Made with Notepad" badge images?

...or the thousands of other badges that I, for whatever reason had to shoehorn into my website?

'Made with Notepad' signs intimidated this FrontPage warrior with copapasta-javascript-animation skillz.

Man, if I had known that badge existed I would've stuck it everywhere. I think one of the reasons I'm so confident with web stuff nowadays is that for the first 3 or 4 years I had literally no idea there were text editors other than Notepad. I remember trying to put together a simple web site on Mac OS X, which frustrated me greatly because I had no idea where to find a plain text editor (for some reason I never found the toggle in TextEdit.app, let alone opened the terminal to run Vim).

Off topic, but I had a fun exchange with my friend the other day. I'm a web developer - he had recently taken a free (paid for by EI) course in web development.

"Can I just borrow your computer for a sec? I noticed a bug on one of my sites, just need to fix it real quick."

"You won't be able to, I don't have Dreamweaver or Filezilla installed."

"Oh...ok."

Proceeds to download putty on the spot and fix my site with vim

Well, now we have those social sharing buttons. Just as messy and pointless

Remember when grey was the default background for pretty much all browsers? Then one day Netscape (I think) came out with a new version and the default background was white. Just like paper. The future was upon us.

Disappointed by the lack of 'under construction' and blue fire gifs.

http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

Screw Frontpage, it littered your markup when you went into design mode. Hotdog Pro or Coffee Cup Editor was where it was at!

Nuh-uh, Allaire Homesite was the true editor!

I remember 1st Page 2000 from Evrsoft, though it might not have been quite in the 90s at that point.

I used homesite 4 and it made a mess out of design mode too. Mainly i used it for the css editor.

oh man, the nostalgia.

HoTMetaL

I was a Hotdog Pro user too. Eventually moved to Homesite.

Anyone else remember, Webrings? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Anyone else remember Webrings? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

The crazy thing is these same patterns come back under new names and for different reasons. Nowadays you have mobile apps cross-promoting other apps, it's practically the webring all over again, except now it's suddenly a new and bold idea worthy of VC money!

Check out some of the bitcoin/dogecoin 'faucet' list sites and you'll see they've been reincarnated, right down to the terrible GeoCities web design.

Don't forget the use of FRAMES - frames separated the elite from the average. Even better were websites that let you choose the "frames version" or the "non-frames version"

I remember one time I discovered I could frame another chat site's chatroom in my own site and build my own form and have it work without any of their ads or whatnot.

You couldn't get away with that now though. Actually they didn't let me get away with it for long.

Oh God, I remember.

And the <hr> tag. And I remember I made a Java applet that consumed so many resources that everyone who visited my page thought their machine had locked up. Good times.

I remember when I realized the <hr> tag supported a color attribute...it was like pulling Excalibur out of the stone.

That's such a good analogy, I'm going to shamelessly steal this.

What do you mean? The <hr> tag is a semantic, valid part of html5.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/hr.html

<hr> is the vestigial tailbone of HTML

I used to love the <HR> tag. Has anyone invented a better way to break up sections?

Section? Sounds like something with a header? I would probably just wrap the section in a section tag.

Not necessarily. A horizontal rule (or flourish) is often used in fiction as a context-shift indicator within a chapter. Technical documents are not the only documents.

Borders and white space. Funny how much of modern clean design aesthetic was already possible to do with basic HTML back in the day but we were too fascinated with blinky flashy colorful tags to ask ourselves "Doesn't this altogether look like neon hell?"

We had to design websites in high school, circa 7-8 years ago. Pretty sure if anyone had implemented a flat desing they would have been given a D for poor effort.

It's all about that terrible blue button in Dreamweaver that animated concentric circles when you hovered over it..

What's necessarily wrong with the <hr> tag? It still has its legitimate use cases.

For instance, when you list corporate structure on your website you can use it to delineate the HR department.

If your java applet just said hello it consumed so many resources. It took minute just to load java, what a stupid idea that was.

Not all that different from Flash, or any other container.

Heh. I wrote a JavaScript DHTML demo in 1999 that I locked to a browser window sized 640x480px because otherwise it made PCs grind to a halt and crashed Macs. Nowadays it runs on my phone just fine... Link for anyone who's interested: http://www.gilesthomas.com/old-javascript/stars/index.html

Just tell everyone you're using WebGL and submit it here.

Ironically, this is what I put together in 2009 (ten years after the DHTML demo) and it also crashed browsers then, and it also runs on my phone now: http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217

Funny how that works.

I remember a friend would troll me by obscuring a url which led to this website that hosted an image with a ridiculously large resolution for computer hardware of the time to render, resulting in a BSOD within 10 seconds. Got me every time!

this was still a problem until very recently. A few years ago I linked a 50k by 50k image in an IRC channel, 2 people experienced an X crash and one had a kernel panic.

Care to find a similar site? I'd love to try it on my i7

This post makes me happy :).

  and 0.gif (fewer characters!) bring back memories. What I miss most was the hacky tricks you'd have to put together to get load times down on dialup. Carefully controlling the order in which things rendered. Early DHTML. Slicing layouts so that as much as humanly possible the images repeated. Tables tables tables. IFrames that talked to each other. The javascript that converted <div>s to <layers> for netscape.

In those days I was certain there would be a complete replacement for HTML/JavaScript/CSS that would take over. Flash came and went. Silverlight was a lovely attempt. We just kept layering lipstick on our pig :).

Keeping load times down on dialup.

last month I hit my usage cap and was capped to 256k downstream. 256k. TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING SIX! FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN DIALUP! I thought that's fine I can cope.

The internet is highly broken at 256k. Pages basically don't ever completely load. You end up having to cancel. You end up turning off images, turning off javascript.

I can't imagine what the web is like at 56k now. Completely fucking un-functional I would imagine.

Pretty much. About 5 years ago I brought my work laptop on vacation where there was only a phone line. No sweat, my laptop still had a 56k modem, and I started on a 1200 baud modem back in the day, so I was willing to be patient, or so I thought.

Once I connected it took almost 2 hours just to start Outlook.

haha, yeah, same I started out on BBS's with a 1200 baud modem and that required serious patience (better than my grand father who had a 300 bps acoustic coupler). We moved interstate and I had no ADSL for a week. I set up a modem, and it had been _years_ since I used one. I forgot you had to enable error correction in the init string (modem init string, remember those!), and so the connection was so bad I couldn't even get a page to load.

Thankfully there's mobile tethering/hot-spotting now

That sucks dude :(. Yeah, people like you are overlooked. You should call customer support for the sites you use most often and complain. Low bandwidth users are a forgotten demographic.

I'm sorry dude :(. You are part of a forgotten demographic.

Oh God yes - remember having to use progressive JPEG's? Now some sites have full screen video in the background!

We 're kind of lucky to have lived through the internet/web's adolescence. I mean, how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology?

For me, it was Jon Udell's column on Byte that first got me interested in web technologies. Great guy.

P.S. Am I the only one who wrote all my html in lowercase? (and always used ' instead of " (one keypress less)?)

A part of me wished I was in my late 20's in that era, not a 12 year old kid. Oh the riches to be had.

I was in my late 20's in that era. The riches were had by a small few. Most often one ended up with worthless stock options.

Dude, an ICQ clone just sold for $19 billion. Still plenty of riches to be had.

yep, in an era where there are tens of thousands of apps flooding the App Store, and millions of people competing with you in SEO

Yeah, no riches for me. It's easy to look back in retrospect and said "oh I had this opportunity" but at the time, it wasn't obvious.

Radio? Television? Film? Airplanes? Jet airplanes? Diesel locomotives? Skyscrapers? Indoor plumbing? Electricity? Municipal water and treated sewage? Cars instead of horses? The transistor? Telephone? Genome sequencing? Orbital satellites? Transoceanic cables? Fax machine? Camera? TNT? The Haber process for ammonia production? The Hall–Héroult process for aluminum production? Penicillin? The polio vaccine?

Actually, name a generation over the last few centuries which hasn't seen the birth of a dozen groundbreaking technologies.

Some of these happened on short bursts during the 20th century, the centuries before didn't experience life-changing technologies often. Also, things like genome sequencing or the fax haven't changed our day-to-day habits as much as the internet did.

> Some of these happened on short bursts during the 20th century, the centuries before didn't experience life-changing technologies often.

More accurately, the "life changing" effects of new technologies (which are often a result of them being synthesized with other technologies and/or applied outside of their original context) took a lot longer to develop, largely because the spread of awareness of new technologies took longer. Which is why the frequency of the appearance of those life-changing effects of technology pretty consistently has increased as the speed and reach of information dissemination technologies has increased.

I believe the 1880s-1920s changed US culture more significantly than the last 50 years. I invite you to show otherwise.

More specifically, consider a 25 year old resident of NYC in 1964 - a member of the jet age, the atomic age, and the transistor era, embedded in a time of great cultural change in American life - and bring them to NYC of the present.

How long do you think it would take for them to get up to speed? What are the "significant life-changing technologies" they would need to learn in order to survive and do well?

Consider then a 25 year old resident of NYC in 1875 and bring them to 1925. I think it would be much harder for that person to adapt than the person from 1964.

Here are some of the significant changes around the turn of the century.

The linotype machine completely transformed the news industry. Before then, no newspaper had more than 8 pages.

Oceanic telegraph lines were in place, so the explosion of Krakatoa became world-wide news within a day. That is, the speed of information was already pretty high. There were 14 million telegraphs daily by the early 1900s, or 1 for every 100 people.

Books and magazines provided a lot of information quickly about the latest inventions and ideas. Take a look at Popular Mechanics from 1905, at http://books.google.se/books?id=S98DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA93&hl=sv&s... for the news. Page 35 has a series of books for home-based education, from stair building to telephones to law school.

For the first time in the US we had more Americans living in cities than on farms. The end of the frontier era lead to Turner's Thesis, which is the basis for the "Frontier" in "Electronic Frontier Foundation."

Dense cities became possible because Otis elevator (1853) and iron-framed building (1864) lead to the first skyscraper, at an amazing height of 10 stories (1884–1885). Commercial use of reinforced concrete also started at around that time.

We developed new methods of information organization, including the Dewey Decimal Classification (okay, that's from the late 1870s), and the vertical file system. The Hollerith punch cards were invented for the 1890 census.

For the first time we had night life, because limelight and electric lights were much cheaper than candles. The first night club was Webster Hall in 1886.

For the first time, humans could fly against the wind, in both airships and airplanes.

For the first time, women could vote.

The steam shovel was invented in 1839 but it wasn't until after steel cable of the 1870s that lead to the first effective shovels of the 1880s. Compare the use of forced labor for the Suez canal to the Marion steam shovel used the Panama Canal a few decades later.

Speaking of the Panama Canal, we discovered that mosquitoes were a disease vector for malaria and yellow fever. Previously it was attributed to "bad air" or an impure lifestyle.

In my own field of chemical information, Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry started in 1881 and IUPAC nomenclature started in 1892.

Bakelite (1907) was "the material of 1000 uses" and it was used everywhere.

It wasn't until 1912 or so that lipstick became fashionable, and for the flappers of the 1920s it was a sign of independence.

It used to be safe to walk on the streets without worrying much, because most traffic were people, horses, and bikes (the 1890s was the 'Golden Age of Bicycles'). Cars changed that. The concept that streets are only for cars, and that walking across the street is "jaywalking" and wrong or illegal, started in the 1910s.

Do you really think the last 50 years are as disruptive as that fin de siècle era? Why?

That's all in the last ~200 years. Go back 1,200 years. What was happening then

An unknown author wrote Beowulf, an odd synthesis of pagan storytelling and christian piety.

Charlemagne. Fucking Charlemagne. Seriously, Western Europe emerging as a political entity.

The various Viking invasions, which end up having a major impact on European trade and English history (and thus by extension, American history).

The 9th century was kind of a big deal.

"The word 'bank' is derived from the Italian word 'banco' signifying a bench, which was erected in the market-place, where it was customary to exchange money. The Lombard Jews were the first to practise this exchange business, the first bench having been established in Italy a.d. 808." - http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/English-Manual/Chapt...

In 867, the Macedonian dynasty took over Byzantium and started its golden age.

The 860s was the start of the First Bulgarian Empire. Bulgaria became Christian (864). The Cyrillic alphabet was developed shortly afterwards as a written script for church books.

The Muslims conquest of Sicily started in 827. They conquered Crete in 820.

Leo VI formally abolished the Roman consular dating system in 888. The 800s is when we started to use Anno Domini widely. (BTW, Leo VI also composed hymns which are still sung in the Eastern Orthodox Church.)

The Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution started in China in 845, in part to get the money needed to pay off the 843 victory against the Uyghurs. The fall of the Uyghur Khaganate caused the Uyghurs to migrate eastwards.

Judaization of the Khazars mostly took place in the 800s.

The 800s is the Pueblo I Era, when the Ancient Pueblo population (the Anasazi) constructed and lived in pueblos. 850 is the start of a major drought in the area, which lasted for 50 years.

It was also the terminal classic period of Mesoamerica. The oldest date found at Chichen Itza is equivalent to 832 AD.

FWIW, the world population then was about 225 million. It's about 7 billion now. That's a 28x difference, which surely affects how much change can occur.

Yes, there were political changes. The question was "name a generation that hasn't seen groundbreaking technological changes".

My thesis is that the rate of technological breakthroughs has been very high for the last 200 years.

The question was "name a generation over the last few centuries which hasn't seen the birth of a dozen groundbreaking technologies."

Notice the part about "last few centuries"?

12 is more than a few. If you're going to bend the rules then so will I. :)

The development of adobe building technology is both literally and metaphorically groundbreaking. These are still known as the pueblo dwellers because of that technology.

A new writing system and a new banking system are also technological developments.

My thesis is that social impact of the technological developments in the 50 years around 1900 was more than the development of the last 50 years. As supporting evidence, I propose that return0's statement "how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology" reveals that there are not that many new groundbreaking technologies these days. Someone from 100 years ago could name a dozen such changes.

> I mean, how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology?

How often can one not? And, since technology advanced to the point where information about such a groundbreaking technology gets to the whole globe in relatively short time, its been pretty hard not to be aware of it.

I used Dreamweaver and hosted in AngelFire, and later on Hypermart. Optimized for Altavista. Signed up for link exchanges. "Submitted" my site to the 1000 search engines. Good ole days.

Hypermart was great. Just had to make sure you strategically placed your <noscript> tags to block the ads.

dont forget geocities :)

Back in the days when SEO meant keyword spam the shit out of Altavista.

Can anyone explain the bit about 1x1.gif being the only way, to this day, to vertically center elements? AFAIK there's still no way to vertically center a dynamic height element without javascript, so if invisible gifs can do it I'd at least like to know how.

You can use CSS flexbox too :)

http://zerosixthree.se/vertical-align-anything-with-just-3-l...

It was used more to stretch table cells to achieve pixel perfect layouts.

I don't know about spacer gifs, but you can use tables. Or fake tables using CSS. JavaScript definitely isn't required, even to vertically center things in IE6.

A little mix of display:table and display:table-cell and vertical-align:middle will get you there without any JS. For example http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/

It's pseudo-centered, not really centered, and can't center a dynamic element.

This even works in IE8: http://jsfiddle.net/QVQLN/

jsfiddle itself doesn't work in IE8, so hier is a direct link: http://fiddle.jshell.net/QVQLN/show/

Flexbox has mostly landed:

http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/demos/vertic...

I don't know that it works in every use case, but I usually use a container with equal left and right margins.

powrtoch was talking about vertically centering.

Oh god. I still use   for spacing things. Like, all the time.

I'm a terrible person.

I have the habit to use it to separate a text from a image, form inputs etc.

For some reason I have &#

...do you mean   ???

That's the numeric entity for a non-breakng space.   is the named entity for the same character.

Yes!

Not burned-in: Escaping stuff on HN. :)

Anyways, I don't recall the details, but there's was a browser (I think) that didn't recognize the named entity so I had to use the numerical form. And after that I used that form all the time when I needed the forced spacing.

In 90s Japan, mojibake (wrong encoding detection) was still a problem that was commonly seen, and UTF-8 wasn't widespread yet. So people put some character at the top of a HTML file to force detection in a certain way.

There was also a plugin called Java so that you could animate bouncing heads in your web page. I wonder whatever happened to that Java stuff.

It kept being installed on millions of consumer PC's despite there being no practical reason to anymore, resulting in millions of malware-infected PC's. :p

... unfortunately a practical reason still exists and it's called "Minecraft".

Minecraft is single-handedly teaching the next generation that having Java installed is somehow useful. For real. I can't teach them "just deinstall that shit", because they can't play Minecraft.

For the nostalgic, it's as good a time as any to revisit the original 1996 Space Jam website, still alive and kicking.

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

Pretty sure the "D" in DHTML stood for "dynamic"

Pretty sure that was part of the joke.

It didn't include my favorite thing ever, JavaScript widgets!

I wrote a little widget called FigmentSearch, which was about as cheesy as you could imagine for around 1996, it let you search through multiple search engines from one text input, back when there were so many choices (Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler, YAHOO, etc.)

I was quite proud of myself, as JavaScript was really new. AT&T had a dialup internet service called WorldNet that was basically #2 or #3 in the US after AOL and probably CompuServe, and they licensed the JavaScript to use on their front page. I thought that was pretty neat, since I was a teenager.

Oh, middle school souvenirs…

88x31 :-D

I think it misses the fact that JavaScript was mostly used for stuff like rollovers on images back then. Oh, and customized scrollbars in IE! Haha! This post is such much fun I can't stop smiling! Thanks for sharing!

preloaders for your gallery :)

Image maps, Server-side includes (I still have a current site using these), cgi scripts, "Creating Killer Websites" by David Siegel who must have been the first self-proclaimed self-important Web guru who gave us the spacer gif. And um, yeah, the D in DHTML is for Dynamic, Mr. Frontpage Webmaster (so much better than Homesite!). Tiled backgrounds, beveled buttons, <font face="Helvetica" size="3">, even used <small> and <big>, and definition lists of course. Has it been that long really? Seems like yesterday.

What a delightful stroll down memory lane! :-) Another one of my favourites for those that remember:

I thought DHTML stood for Dynamic HTML?

Cool, I going to add this site to my webring.

Does anyone else remember those amazingly epic flash sites? I even learned Flash 3 because of those... wow...

- http://www.thefwa.com/flash10/gabo.html - http://www.eye4u.com/home/

There are others (manoone) but I can't find archived copies.

You miss the part of tables. It is until today the only really reliable way to center a div box horizontally and vertically:

      <html>
        <head>
          <title>Vertical Alignment</title>
          <style type="text/css">
            html, body, bodytable { height: 100%; }
            bodytablerow { vertical-align: center; }
            bodytablecell { text-align: center; }
            content { 
              text-align: auto;
              width: 100px; height: 100px
            }
          </style>
        </head>
        <body><table id="bodytable">
          <tr id="bodytablerow">
            <td id="bodytablecell">
              <div id="content">

blabla

              </div>
            </td>
          </tr>
        </table></body></html>

Oh yeah the dreaded 1x1 pixel gif. Some genius motherfucker used one of those beauties in a large corporate site I was working on and was using it to indent header text - with javascript.

I just about went blind trying to find it and swore if I ever found that guy I would fight him. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy we've moved on to bigger and better things.

I learned web design by saving the html for MSN.com back when it looked like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000229044717/http://www.msn.co...?

A lot of trial and error... but good times.

I remember working with MS Frontpage in the beginning. Frames were the shit in 1998. Who got the most amazing running font? Who has the most freaking elevator midi as a background sound? Yes, the background sound tag. Does that even exist anymore?

Pfft. Amateurs. DHTML is where it's at, baby!

https://web.archive.org/web/20030927154612/http://www.ghostn...

Yeah, tell me that's not totally sexy ;)

I created this as a sort of web front experiment. Back when I just ran an IRC server and forum, it was kind of a bummer that there was no real front "site". This was supposed to be a stylized entry point for that. I don't remember the links that were on the menu, but I do remember that "Chromeless Widows" were all the rage.

Also, I wasn't comfortable with Flash, so I did the front interface with JavaScript. The irony of things coming back full circle to that (in some way) isn't lost on me.

<tr> <td width="1%"><img src="spacer.gif" width="250" height="1"> Left Col of 250px </td> <td width="99%">Fluid Col of Remainder</td> </tr>

Let's see the same thing with CSS! Oh, how far we've come...

    <style>span {display: inline-block}</style>
    <span style="width: 250px"></span><span style="width: calc(100% - 250px)"></span>

When I was a kid (well, a less decrepit and slightly less old man) and there was no calc(), we did that sort of thing with padding-left, float, and negative margin-left.

not bad! calc and inline-block is fairly recent, right?

From memory, calc is IE9 and inline-block is IE6.

http://caniuse.com/ can answer these questions for you in general. If you're looking into newer layout techniques, you should also check out flexbox.

90s? I was still building "DHTML menus"[1] with IE filters[2] in ~2003. Don't know if proud or ashamed.

I used to use an editor called Arachnophilia [3], which surprisingly is still in development. Way better than FrontPage.

[1] http://www.effectmaker.com/gallery/jsslidemenu/index.html

[2] http://www.effectmaker.com/gallery/jsimageswapmenu/index.htm...

[3] http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.php

I was also a big fan of Arachnophilia back in the day. The creator is actually a regular HN user too lutusp.

In the mid-90s I discovered HTML and cleaned up the web page for the company I was contracting for. It was supposed to be a 5-hour a week side project that became 20 hours a week often. I discovered David Seigel's web site, where I learned all the magic of the single-pixel gif and table layouts. I bought his book "Creating Killer Websites," and followed his web journal, which was a new concept at the time.

I took a detour for a bit, working on server-side projects in C++ and Java, but came back to a new world of CSS and for a time was quite confused. Certainly our tools for creating killer websites have improved, but I have very fond memories of those early days.

What a great book. Every site need an intro and a "foyer" page, and a wall of images that were split up and aligned in a table.

It seems so goofy now, but his advice was actually an improvement over the gray-background, fat-bordered, use-every-font stuff that passed for Web design at the time.

I began doing web development in the early 2000s and I remember a lot of these things, so it's not just for 90s web devs.

I did love the 1px gif though, that sucker was useful.

How about doing rounded corners with images? The bigger the radius, the more padding your content had!

The biggest change I noticed from web pre-1999 to modern web is ... Times New Roman. (And bright blue links, obviously.)

Every time I've knocked together some markup and haven't written any CSS yet, I get a big old dose of nostalgia when I boot it up in the browser and see those ass-ugly serifs everywhere.

I can only imagine what traditional designers thought of 'the future' back then. "OK, space cadet, let me introduce you to a radical new concept called 'typography'..."

IIRC, my own Geocities site was yellow TNR on a background tiled with the cover of Tool's Aenima, and had no particular theme, except a lot of curse words and teenage acting out.

Ahh the good old days. Lot of great times building and deploying new anime and game fan sites every other day, with text file FAQs, MIDI music, and plenty of Metool under construction GIFs. The Web truly sucks for kids today.

Don't forget the w3c valid xhtml badges. Though that's more early-2000s

come to think of it, i don't even remember the last time I validated any page i built.

Overnight, the entire internet converted into this sludge of a medium where text looked like links and links looked like text. You had no idea where to click

Ha! I am still pissed off about this. I remember my first days on StackOverflow, going to a 'moved' question (thanks alot, Google) and not knowing where the hell it was moved to nor how to get there. Am I expected to move my mouse slowly over the page until it changes? Look at the source code of the page? Read a FAQ or something?

PS Also pissed off about these new cars that I can't figure out how to start- nor turn off!

Sometimes I long for the simplicity of the 1x1 transparent gif. Combined with tables for layout, it really brought the notion of "design" to the web and helped transform the web to mass medium.

Tables + 1x1.gif don't really seem much simpler than CSS with flexible boxes.

complete browser compatibility (yes nearly 100%) and fast to layout without wierd box model behavior which was fixed only relatively recently.

That's by virtue of being older, not simpler. There was also a time when 1x1.gif and tables weren't supported anywhere.

Oh man. The shot of nostalgia brought on by this brought me almost to tears. I had them all, Geocities, Tripod... Saturday mornings hooked in to ftp.idsoftware.com at 33.6k and hand-crafting updates to my sites in notepad.exe (using uppercase tags, naturally).

It's ridiculous... the web is a much better place, technologically, nowadays, but something for me has been lost. As the author alluded to at the end of the article, it's all frameworks and abstractions. It's high gloss and low content. Bah.

And with this post, I have become my parents.

We were still using these techniques a few years ago for emails. :(

A few years ago?! We're still using a lot of that for emails now!

Cutting edge for email is responsive design with media queries and... tables for layout.

Please move this discussion to the alt.www.webmaster newsgroup.

I remember the first time I met a webmaster IRL. It blew me away. The guy was a total badass (in my head, at least). My brother would talk to the webmaster about something called Perl. I did an Altavista search and started to write Perl on my paper notebook (did not know how to run it on my Windows 95 machine).

I can still remember the client wanting the underlined links removed from the website. I explained that this was how everybody new what a link was, but it didn't fit the style. The first time I heard about this css thing. It was tables all the way down in those days, and there was talk that this wasn't the best way to do things.

Yet still to this day, something are only manageable with tables. But with have display:table-cell now, so it is all different.

1/ IE4 was really a better browser than Netscape at the time (never used Opera so please spare me on this one). I think it's the only IE I used my main browser before switching back to Navigator and then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

2/ You could style the scrollbars on IE4 !

3/ About link styling : for some time underline+overline was all the rage on :hover. I don't think it will make a come back, who knows.

Exciting times

You inspired me to go and look to see if my old Digimon fansite was still on Tripod. Turns out it was. [0]

Showing off my classy classy Jasc Paint Shop Pro 5 skills, my marquee tags, pixel fonts, badly repeating background, 88x31 buttons for affiliates, links with underline and OVERline hover.

I am truly sorry, internet.

[0]: http://digiauk.tripod.com/index2.shtm

This list is amazing. On a related note, I only found out last year that the ever-mysterious "CGI Scripting" I remembered doing in my youth was actually just Perl the whole time.

I had guestbooks in CGI, tagboards in CGI. And you guys remember Greymatter, right?

How about b2?

I still hold a grudge against Wordpress for over-complicating what was a simple, bare-bones blogging software.

Ahhh, the 90s and early 2000s was a great time for the web.

I was a "webmaster" in the early days. A friend of mine raytraced a bunch of colored spheres and cones to use as images for bullet lists and he eventually found them on dozens of popular site layouts. I remember the day Yahoo went to two columns and I discovered that tables could be used for layout. Or the day Mosaic got support for transparent GIFs. Then came the blink tag ...

404s for me. Link path is missing ~zach/ prefix.

Oh god I remember all of these. I'm so happy CSS came along. So very happy.

I started learning web stuff right around the Tables vs. CSS war. Terrible thing. Not many survivors. They didn't even get a wall of fallen heroes like some other wars did.

Although if I were to put up a wall now, I don't know which side to. CSS kind of won, but Bootstrap brought tables right back. I'm confused. Who won?

All so true.

I still have my copy of "HTML: The Definitive Guide" [0].

I thought I was hot stuff when I figured out how to pre-cache images by making invisible references to them on my landing page.

I really enjoyed trying to make things look good and appear fast in the dial-up era.

0: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565921757.do

Floating text following the mouse pointer. The bonus one was the scrolling text in the bottom left of the browser panel (location bar?)

> (location bar?)

I think you mean "status bar", but yeah they were all the rage.

Browsing the markup of geocities pages to learn how to do X in html. Creating a geocities page about the Ford Mustang GT (5.0, yo). Going into Yahoo chat, meeting other people and then exchanging mailing addresses to write to each other. E-mail was just weird. Oh, and meeting my wife on ICQ. Only a 90's kid will know... :)

Lol, all of these items brought back memories. I used to be a master at the 1x1 shim.gif. You should also include the crazy table layouts we had. Before the days of div tags we had to use multiple nested tables with 1x1 gif spacing within them to produce a complicated design accurately on every browser. Sigh ... I feel old now at 32.

good times! That moment when you had to --debug-- refactor your 30+ levels of nested tables filled with gifs and font tags ;)

Ha ha! Brilliant!

CGI Scripts anyone?

Unfortunately I remember very well the days when it all started to become popular. I created my personal Web page in '94 hosted on the University's servers. 2 years later I was creating Web applications using shell or C-based CGI scripts. And then when I saw Duke juggling I started to work on Java.

I had a C-based CGI script that was essentially a flat-file database engine in '97 that got me booted from the Uni server.

Feels like coming full circle to now be building a webapp with Go.

People still use CGI scripts. I got paid to rewrite one a couple of years ago.

I did at least used Python's wsgiref CGI adapter, so it wouldn't be hard to migrate to a newer technology.

I used some random site to learn HTML and make a Dragon Ball Z fan page on Xoom, complete with crazy cursors and a cool (or so I thought!) midi soundtrack.

Pretty cool that the site I used to learn still works ~15 years later:

http://labrocca.com/htmlementary/

I am not a 90s web developer, but i remember this, since it was one of the things that my university teachers taught me on my web development class in 2010, along with tables, inline styles and bad php code, and don't get me started with the VB6/Net and MSAccess classes. The Horror :(.

Yes. I was a 90s developer. I was only 8 years old. I was born in 1991. I remember them. I used them to make my personal webpage as part of my computer class (yes we learned that at such young age at HK) assignment. God, they were fun! And you know what else we were doing? Dreamweaver MX!

   <HR>
    <CENTER>Don't forget page dividers!</CENTER> 
   <HR>

This should be the companion reader to the HTML Horror page[1]

Speaking of SHTML... has anyone else always read it as "shitmail" in their head?

[1] http://www.goer.org/htmlhorror/htmlhorror1.html

I built various quake2 clan pages in the 90ies with humongous table layouts and cgi scripts to enter clan wars...i wish i would have saved that stuff somewhere... Zach doesn't look old enough to have been able to understand HTML in the 90ies though imo ;)

http://www.carnagge.com/

few more to add: Flash installation detection by using a flash redirect to a flash only site. IE vs Netscape detection. Disable right-click > view source to prevent others from stealing your l33t code. pop-up ads on top of hundreds of other pop-up ads

  is an entity, not a tag.

I remember when galaxy.com was the only place you could find any content with your NCSA Mosaic program. The site is still there, waiting to serve your retro browsing needs. Dunno about Mosaic but you can probably find that somewhere too.

No mention of the dancing baby?

I hope in a few years to see similar articles reminiscing the also-lost "Only _(broad demographic)_ will remember this" and "Top _(number)_ _(memes or things)_ from _(pop culture topic)_" headlines.

Anyone else use to get a design and put it through the Fireworks chopper? You'd draw where you wanted your table rows and cells to be and it would chop up the image and give you a lovely HTML table to display it all.

Was awful!

Everytime I see Geocities mentioned I feel sad as I could never find my old Geocities site, I tried searching through the archives. All I remember is I was in SiliconValley/Lakes after that I'm stumped.

I remember using images that looked almost identical to <HR> in place of an actual <HR> tag. Plus the million variations (you didn't have a real site until you have a <HR> image that matched your theme).

I remember the 1x1 transparent pixel with great affection---it was the output of my first significant CGI script (in Perl, of course) that I used as a site counter.

Winsock! Fuck yeah!

I remember when a web page and a gopher site looked almost identical (yes, gopher was quite cool for awhile).

The Table vs CSS wars never ended and are just in a temporary cease fire.

I started my own webring. And ring of rings. And proudly displayed my "made with notepad" button. And the black one with the red ribbon for... 2600? or EFF?

The most popular websites were vast collections of poorly transcribed midi collections that took years to master as every fucktard in middle school band uploaded a slightly different version of every song on earth. Twice, if it was Stairway to Heaven.

I was a webmaster.

Everyone bitched about SSI and its security holes but everyone used it anyway because fuck you, inline or die! Except it was universally only used for image counters and random quote generators.

My local ISP gave everyone a shell, email, ftp, and web account. You just had to figure out SLIP and PPP.

State of the art at one point was dialing into a local BBS to access their internet connection so you could use lynx to pull up the first sites.

Animated GIFs will survive cockroaches.

Frontpage when it first came out was a horrible POS. It would randomly move half your links, reformat them, rearrange your files, and change your background to bright red. Just, well, who the fuck knows why.

TABLES WITH 3D BORDER SUPPORT. FUCK YEAH. IT'S NOT A 3D BUTTON UNTIL IT'S IN ITS OWN 3D TABLE FOR EMPHASIS.

------------

Even though browsers have all kinds of compatibility issues now, they are mostly minor. There were several years where IE would say "we're just going to put in our own marquee tab, why the fuck not?" then Netscape would say "We're all going to VRML. Oh and you can set the background color" and IE would say "Shit, we're just going to put a TV in here. You want a TV? Use IE." and Netscape would say "Fucking A, our new <cat> tag actually purrs. Does IE have <cat> support? NO! (because we just invented it)" and Netscape would say "DUDE. LLLLLAAAAYYYYERRRZZZZZZ AND SHIT" and IE would say "FUCK IT WE'LL JUST PUT A WHOLE OTHER BROWSER FRAME IN YOUR BROWSER FRAME."

It really was quite a crazy and extremely blatant war over the future. IE won when it's "waiting" icon because a large spinning globe and a million VB ActiveX developers were unleashed upon the world. That was just the jihad, though. The battle was actually won when Gates just stonewalled the shit out of the courts for 4 years, causing Netscape to slowly lose their mind until they became convinced that rewriting their entire fucking code base was the way forward.

your winsock comment made me cringe.

So many memories on this list.

Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.11, dialing into a small mom and pop ISP in my town in Tennessee (I think they were pretty much all mom and pops back then). Then fire up Netscape and surf as well as you could at 2400 baud. Which actually worked pretty well because everything was slow and you just kind of expected it.

Or learning cool HTML tricks by looking at the source, then practicing it myself on the 1mb of storage space my ISP gave us. These days, most of the time, simply viewing the source doesn't tell you a whole lot about what's going on without spending some time digging into JS and CSS for a page. I remember being thrilled when we got an upgraded Netscape version that actually allowed you to save images.

It wasn't just the web, either. I miss spending hours and hours playing MUDs. Some of the best times I had in my teen years were on MUDs; 20 years later I still keep in contact with some of the people I met.

The Internet's pretty awesome now, don't get me wrong. I get to write code and make money doing it, in an economy that didn't exist, really, back then. But there's a part of me that really misses that early wild west Internet that existed just prior to the first dot-com boom. Back when we were just first figuring this stuff out...

zMUD. :)

MUDs are doing just fine, I'm still playing one.

MajorMud

My first website was hosted on a free angelfire.com account. Or was it geocities? Maybe both, but it certainly had a lot of blinking gifs and photoshop-sliced buttons with rollover affects.

My dad would use rollover images for his buttons. To get the responsiveness he needed, he preloaded all the images by displaying them 1x1 pixel at the bottom of the page.

that... makes me feel very old, and I'm 32 :(

But, what is this compared to the JS-animated status-text?

(Does anyone remember window.status -- the 90s equivalent to the title-attribute? Does anyone remember a browser with a status bar?)

Counters, undetconstruction images

I remember we had a clientside script that changed ilayers to those weird div tags so you could drag stuff around in both broswers.

But rarely saw anyone use blink tag at all

Blink tags were annoying even then.

My old CRT had amazingly high resolution given that it was only 17" or something. Of course you couldn't really see much at 1600x1200, but it could do it!

This was what jumped out at me. People have short memories; screen resolutions have not really improved in the last 15 years, and possibly aren't still as high as the rate they were at in the late 90s. Of course, they've improved in other, very obvious ways.

Seriously - only recently bootstrap started to dethrone "table" tag as the most easy to use and the most cross browser compatible page layout tag :)

In Russia we served HTTP traffic on non-standard ports, such as 8100, 8101, 8102 in addition to default 80. It was very common in 90s. Can anyone guess, why?

i give up, tell us why!

To solve the problem with non-US character-encoding. Web browsers of 90s were notoriously bad with client-side encoding. The only way to show content properly for all available clients was server-side recoding and different HTTP ports were used to serve content with different encoding - ISO, DOS, Windows and KOI. Each web-page had a set of links, usually in top-right corner, labeled as "ISO", "DOS", "Win" and "KOI" which transferred you to corresponding HTTP port.

i was actually going to guess this. very interesting.

Brings back first .cgi issues and learning to add double new line at the beginning of the output :) `print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";`

As a 23 year old new employee at a company transitioning away from a website built with FrontPage, Comic Sans, and 1x1 gifs, this is all too real.

... Says the guy with a website which only supports IE9+! I had to switch browsers.. even though he agrees my choice of IE4 is best, nonetheless!

Oh shit if you didn't have a starry background <blink>-tagged website with image maps you were not a person in the 90's internet.

Last week, out of boredom I sent an old website to w3c validator. This was from dreamweaver 4 era, so many inlined styles and dangling elements.

Very popular trick to get 1px borders: a table with background color of required border color and then another table inside with cellspacing=1.

I always used <table frame="border" rules="both"> for 1px borders.

You could stack marquee tags, creating an animation in an animation. Great fun for forums that didn't escape HTML input!

In order to put a border around something you'd need to nest a table inside another table with a background color.

We didn't need any stupid CSS borders, either, just nested tables with cellpadding=1 and a black background.

That's awesome http://dhtmlconf.com/

The web changes, but the truly ground breaking technology doesn't age (by this I mean animated gifs).

Still amazed to this day that animated gifs are everywhere.

Remember the GIF patent war of 1992-1994? Man... CompuServe ftw?

DHTML actually stood for Dynamic HTML.

Didn't I mention <blink> nested in a <marquee> just the other day? I think I did.

I only wonder if putting a marquee and a blink tag on your blog will cut your pagerank.

http://lard.5u.com/

Editing pages with notepad.exe

I'm sure somebody else has mentioned it, but don't forget frames!

Has anybody written a shim for <blink> that uses CSS animations?

My life was changed the day a friend showed me how to view source.

I wrote programs to write  s. Surely I am going to Hell.

I've got a grin from ear to ear. Ah, memories....

I remember how I hated my warez Frontpage '98 :)

warez, haven't heard that term in a while. i still pirate everything though lol

It should stop when the mouse is over the marquee!

SITE CREATED WITH NOTEPAD (THE RIGHT WAY)

transparent.gif? Ridiculous. I used so many of them, using the name t.gif made my site load faster. Every edge!

Zach Holman, present this at DHTML Conf!

Man, I loved buttons.

This post made with vim.

Hilarious, but needs more vbscript.

OR ANYONE STILL DOING HTML EMAILS

Writing code for HTML email is like a time machine. Even the most basic of CSS like setting a margin only works in some clients. Un freaking believable.

Yea, the   and 1px transparent png's are your best friend in that world.

This is so true, so funny! :D

oh my God, _web rings_...

if you didn't have a web ring you weren't shit!

Thanks buzzfeed.

this is the single greatest blog post ever.

this is such a click-bait title

Love this!

I miss the tacky neon Comic Sans font with dark backgrounds with midi blaring. Geocities comes to mind. I miss those days.

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