this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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As an amateur web designer in the 90s and early 2000s, this speaks to me. I stopped web development when CSS became popular and I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Is there a petition I can sign to scrap all this nonsense modern web progress and go back to that beautiful, dial-up friendly HTML?
I stopped doing frontend work when responsive design became important. Super unpleasant work. Now I'm happier at the backend where I don't have to worry about how my shit looks on the 7 million possible screen sizes people are likely to use. Life is more peaceful here.
Frontend developer here, please save me from my torment, thanks
Have you considered just forcing everyone to access your sites via Internet Explorer 5.5?
and netscape navigator. ah my glory days!
Ahh the old Nutscrape Aggrivator. Refused to update with Microsoft standards and spent the next 8 years being a pain in the ass for website compatibility.
Microsoft standards?
Sounds like we're due for a history lesson.
No. I was just looking for an example of when Microsoft created standards for IE that other browsers could adopt, given that they were tied into IIS and undocumented in order to give them an uncompetitive advantage. Let's also think about how they deliberately downgraded performance, or broke functionality on non Microsoft browsers, again for anti competitive behaviour.
They were called browser wars for a reason, and Microsoft is very well documented indeed regarding their fuckerry. But you go ahead trolling.
Yes, everything you said is correct, ipso facto Microsoft won and was setting the standards at the time.
The competitors still had significant market share and thus their obstinance to follow the leader lead to a large portion of users that had to be catered to by web developers for compatibility due to corporate requirements for access to these market shares.
Thus because these competitors weren't the key demographic, in the context of a developer, they were an additional burden due to the severe lack of uniform standards between major platforms.
No they were not setting standards. They were in fact breaking them. Their own standards were not disclosed, forcing competitors to actually have to reverse engineer them in order to try to have a chance at compatibility. The whole reason for the lack of uniformity was Microsoft fucking with the standards!
Secondly, the competitors did not have a significant market share. Thirdly, it's funny that you mention in the context of a developer, given that they all complain mightily, even to this day, about having to support the festering pile of IE versions still around. Still, this won't stop you telling, so you go do your thing elsewhere please.
Sure, just ignore the context I provided and substitute it for your own, doesn't change they were the market maker and the primary development platform for web with IE, I know this because I've probably been a developer longer than you've been alive, and had to create work arounds for compatability with netscape for those 8 years I mentioned.
What do you mean the competitors didn't have market share, in '98 netscape was 41.5% of all browsers to IE's 48.3%. You don't even know what you're talking about.
Your idealistic hard on with Microsoft' s tactics doesn't change the reality that they became market leader, or that they were the ones using that influence to drive standards. Saying the standards weren't known is also bullshit because we were developing on those standards. So yes, Microsoft was market leader and Microsoft was calling the shots for website development standards, because they had market share whether you like how they got there or not, it doesn't change this objective fact.
Funny how you want to engage in part of a conversation and then instead of wanting to hear a rebuttal you just want me to go away so you can think happy ignorant thoughts. Why did you bother responding?
In 800x600 pixel resolution.
As recently as 6 or 7 years ago I maintained some apps that forced 5.5 compatibility mode. Because they were poorly architected in a shitty framework and no one was willing to do or pay for or train for a rewritten version. They were finally migrating to .NET when I left. It was the govt so they are likely wrapping up that migration now.
Alright hang on now - responsive design is about not excluding people based on the device they're using. Many people do everything in their lives from a low end cell phone and cutting them out is a shit thing to do. Responsive design and progressive enhancement are objectively good things.
The tools have gotten better over the past several years, it's not as hard as it used to be.
? Who said anything about excluding anything or anyone? I'm just saying I don't like the work that has to go into making sure nobody's excluded. In a way, I'm not excluding anyone by excluding everyone now. I quit frontend altogether, left other people to deal with it. At the backend I don't have to worry about what kind of screen the other end might be using to view the JSON string I sent them. You don't get "I just looked at your response headers on my 32:9 monitor that I divided into 9 randomly sized tiles and it looks like shit, please fix" calls when you work backend.
Better? Not really. My experience is that sites have gotten "better" for mobile at the cost of making them nearly or completely unusable for people using desktop browsers with non-default settings (especially additional security lockdown, but even forcing a specific colour scheme can break some sites because some idiot calling himself a designer used css background-image for images that are content). Which means a fair number of sites are broken to some degree for me.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Those things are completely unrelated? I said the tools for responsive design have gotten better, which they objectively have.
You're not wrong that most css in the wild is trash, and I love dark mode as much as the next guy but you can't complain that sites break when you're fucking with styles. It's the cost of tinkering.
Modern frameworks make responsive design easier but yes it is still a lot to wrap your head around. I remember building my hs robotics team website in high school right as responsive design was becoming a thing. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO NEST A CONTAINER IN A CONTAINER I ALREADY HAVE ONE!!!"
Bless those who came up with flexbox
I love to see the occasional flexbox appreciation, since at least for me (someone just getting into Design/Web dev) flexbox changed responsive design from being a totally unfeasible project to being genuinely fun to work on, and sometimes the most exciting part!
Wanna play a modern front-end dev simulator? Check this https://artpolikarpov.github.io/garmoshka/
This is literal art
Let's just design every website using a table again. Or even better, frames!
Don’t forget image maps!
Laughs in frameset!
Kids nowdays try hard to do with divs what was already possible with framesets.
Also I feel bad every time I remember that was taken away from us!
What do you mean? I still write my sites in HTML 4.1 and frameset works fine in all the browsers I've tried. HTML 4.1 is still a standard, I can only recommend more people use it. HTML5 isn't really a standard.. it's a "living document".. pff.
``
You're allowed to
<center>things and use `` without shame... or if you really do prefer it, you can still wrap that relative positioned<div>with auto margins in an absolute positioned parent<div>or whatever CSS bullshit makes stuff centered nowadays.One thing I always though was very backwards in CSS is the paradigme to make
<div>into tables instead of the other way. Tables are an easy and simple way to layout things and if it could degrade into divs you'd have your responsive design making many related CSS standards unnecessary.Sheriff? Yes, this commenter right here.
Oh no you wouldn't..
“And so the Gods (also known as the W3C) spoke down to the Programmers and said: ‘You shall not use tables for non-tabular data.’ And so it was.”
You're insane if you think doing layouts with tables is easier than flexbox/grid.
In the context of the modern web, I take that as a badge of honor. I've build pages using flexbox/grid and I've done so only for the sake of responsive layout, because of the way that tables can't degrade to a bunch of boxes, but a bunch of boxes can by styled to look like a table. It is a convoluted way of doing table layout instead of just using a table.
A table has semantic meaning: it's for presenting tabulated data, not for building layouts. That's why they behave the way they do and require the format they require. Table layouts have always been a hack, it's just that for awhile there weren't better options.
Again, you are insane if you're still doing table layouts in 2023.
I stand by that iframes had their place, even if the backend devs absolutely hated them.
Running each app component in it's own iframe is perfectly valid microservices architecture change my mind.
Technically correct.
They still have their place; for example to embed Google Maps or a YouTube video. Generally, whenever you want to embed something from a different website you have no control over, that shouldn't inherit your style sheets, and should be sandboxed to prevent cross site scripting attacks.
Are iframes really sandboxed in different processes than the main frame? On which browsers?
Iframes cannot access the main frame's DOM if the iframe is from a different origin than the main frame, and they never share the same JavaScript execution context, so an iframe can't access the main frame's variables etc.
It's not required that iframes run in a different process, but I think they do at least in Chrome and Firefox if they're from a different origin. Also, iframes with the
sandboxattribute have a number of additional restrictions, which can be individually disabled when needed.Seems to me they were mostly used to put content inside a scrollable element. Their place has mostly been taken by overflow:auto hasn't it? I think this is the better way.
I believe Kingdom of Loathing used iframes extensively to achieve what looked like a "dynamic" page long before that was a thing.
Oooh I loved my inline frames.
I was so fucking proud of that. My links down the left side, two inline frames neatly in a box on the right, perfectly designed in two versions. One for 800x600, the other for 1024x768.
I did websites for bands from East Tennessee, one for a weird website for survivors of “satanic ritual abuse”. I thought it was nuts but I made a hundred bucks.
I wouldn’t even know where to start on the modern web. I’m fine with that too. I lost the passion for it when everyone under the sun wanted me to be their free tech support years ago.
I remember when I first started on homestead. Seeing my dangling skeleton gifs and my “under construction” banners made me feel like something. There it was, the World Wide Web, and I had my own place on it. Perpetually under construction.
I used to love browsing geocities and the log in name would be right there in the link. Something like geocities.com/cartman1988
I’d guess the password and change things around on their page to mess with them. “Hmmm, Cartman eh? Let’s try southpark. I’M IN. Time to photoshop dicks on this dude’s face!”
To be a kid again.
Y’all got me all old and nostalgic here. :p
Think my eye twitched from the thought of frames again 🫨
https://media.tenor.com/cJM3MCBQXlEAAAAM/cringe-flinch.gif
Check out Gemini!
It's an alternative protocol to HTTP with a focus on simplicity and being much harder to abuse for user tracking.
It's still a small community, but growing.
If you miss the internet of the nineties, there's some echoes of it here.
I second this request to rewind time back to 90s, I would like to remake few life decisions I made :D
Only a few?
Lucky guy.