I remember fights over whether or not navigation in frames was bad practice. Not iframes, frames. Who here remembers frames?
I remember using HTTP 204 before AJAX to send messages to the server without reloading the page.
I remember building... image maps[1]... professionally in the early 2000. I remember spending multiple days drawing the borders of States on a map of the country in Dreamweaver so we could have a clickable map.
I remember Dreamweaver templates and people updating things wrong and losing their changes on a template update and no way to get it back because no one used version control.
I remember <input type=image> and handling where you clicked on an image in the backend.
I remember streaming updates to pages via motion jpeg. Still works in Chrome, less reliably in Firefox.
I remember the multiple steps we took towards a proper IE PNG fix just to get alpha blending... before we got the ActiveX one that worked somewhat reliably... Just for tastes to change and everything to become flat and us to not really need it anymore.
I remember building site navigations in Java, Flash, and Silverlight.
I remember spacer gifs and conditional comments and what a godsend Firebug was.
I don't know when I got old, it just happened one day.
I remember working for a client who needed to support IE6 (with all the insane bugs/quirks/limitations) and I’d despair every time the designers would hand over a Photoshop design with rounded corners. They also needed it to be responsive (at the time mostly just different desktop sizes). Would usually require cutting the corners out and positioning them in table cells. There’s a certain amount of dev resilience you build having to do stuff like that by hand!
I developed web software with frames and I thought it was perfectly fine. To this day I still don't understand the issue with frames. People sometimes mention accessibility for screen readers, but nothing more specific than that, so I still don't know what the actual problem is.
> I remember meticulously using the photoshop slice tool
I made so many newsletters using that tool back in 2009.
I remember a new designer was appalled I used it, and did not write the HTML code manually... 70% of our receivers were using Outlook and the horrible Word-based HTML renderer. I'm not writing anything manual for that piece of crap.
I made a webchat with frames; an infinitely-loading top part for the text, and the bottom an input box that received 204 to not reload when you sent a message. I guess that was the most elegant way to do it in the IE4+ days.
The top part could also receive a small <script> that would reload the frame on the right, containing the user list. Fun times. Used it with a couple class mates around 2000 iirc.
I managed to get real-time chat (and other real-time colab) working on IE4+ using long polling, by continuously adding <script> tags from JavaScript. The server would delay answering until there were new messages available, or some timeout. This was even before xmlhttprequest. Who needs websocket? :-)
Sounds fancy! My solution back then was infinitely auto-updating a frame with a meta refresh tag. It would receive a new <script> block that would update the contents of other frames. This of course wouldn't give real-time functionality.
Don't know if it was intentional, but your ramble reminded me of the lyrics of Losing my edge by LCD Soundsystem. However, as someone who also experienced most of this stuff, it was a fun read either way :)
I remember a website about Ski-Doo snowmobiles that my friend was obsessed about (both the website and snowmobiles) in 1998 or so. It was from Canada, and the bgsound was the website owner saying something in French.
To us, it sounded like: fjänfny, hmmhmmhmm, dadadada. I only realized lately that the first word must be "bienvenue". It would be amazing to find it again on archive.org but unfortunately I dont remember more than this. :)
For those who prefer not to visit yt, the quote "I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago" refers to Elrond talking about the time when Isildur took the One Ring from Sauron.
I created this a while ago, and whenever I show someone they are shocked to see there is absolutely no JavaScript; all of the animations are done via marquee tags: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/
My favorite trick with <marquee> was to nest them, with different, alternating directions. You could make the contents alternate between scrolling and stopping by setting the inner marquee to travel in the opposite direction at the same speed as the outer marquee. Or do more levels with alternating speeds to make it zip around randomly. I think you had to set a max width for the inner marquees for this to work?
A friend of mine would always put `<blink>` around his middle name as a quick and dirty way to test for missing escaping and possible xss. Back in the day this was surprisingly effective at uncovering problems :-)
The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as an experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using (Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to "blonk". Tada, no more blinking!
in the German Mozilla docs there's was a warning: "this tag is one of the worst things you can do to your users, please don't use this" which they sadly removed.
I find marquee extremely useful, for one reason: HTML injection.
I find it helpful to test for HTML injection vulnerabilities because marquee moves, and it's a tag that (almost) nobody intentionally uses, making it easy to identify when an attack works.
I also find it helpful to show non-technical people the effects of HTML injection, because, again, it moves. "This moves and it really shouldn't move" is something people understand better than "this text is bold and it really shouldn't be bold."
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days."
> from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla)
And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.
Same here, but this is in spite is the governance of the foundation looking so out of rails and simultaneously lake of better alternative I'm aware of with both better governance and fine enough technological state.
I assume you were being sarcastic? I see it the other way around - the sooner Mozilla gets off the drugs^WGoogle's money the better the chance we get a proper competitor to Chrome.
Um, so, how are Mozilla supposed to get the hundreds of millions of dollars a year it costs to pay engineers to maintain an evergreen browser without Google's funding?
The opposite will happen as they lose most of their funding. They will have to fire most developers and switch to chromium, to become yet another Chrome reskin. Congratulations, you killed Firefox.
I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0].
My magnum opus was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black page, and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you moused around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room interface.
You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then, you needed Flash.
I just applied for an evisa for India. It was horrendous. Pages wouldn’t continue without telling you what was wrong (too many or not enough commas in the address/phone field was one). When returning to the form the pre filled data had quotes in, which then wasn’t valid. Missing labels on fields. Then the hilarious “what countries in the last ten years, list all or get deported” combined with “you have too many countries”. They only allow 20.
I don’t know if it’s the state of development in the country as a whole or just the lowest bidder for a government service problem.
Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> to tell everyone the website made in notepad in 1997 was still under construction in bold, Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow background. Don't forget the lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls off for even a longer period of time and the reader has to wait for their computer to shift the message back into the viewport.
What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and computers were slower back that then, so large marquees would blink and scroll with visible tearing.[0]
Considering the marquee tag works in basically all browsers [1], has anyone here actually found a good, unironic use for it in today's world of crazy CSS animations?
I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even some multi-axis marquees for rain effect.
It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS.
I never figured out why the actual <marquee> tag has a low frame rate. Maybe it’s to make it more unpleasant so you won’t want to use it. Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead for the frame rate reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on a page.
One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused.
However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For someone new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to use <blink> or <marquee>. These were the gateway drugs of the HTML world, and, anyone that used these elements would eventually learn not to, or maybe not, if it was their mySpace page.
It is easy to hate on the <blink> and <marquee> elements, much like how every snobbish graphic designer can chortle about stupid people using Comic Sans, however, all of these no-no's had great utility in giving people confidence to give things a go.
They took away the <blink> tag from us, due to what can only be explained as the high costs to maintain such a complex feature in modern browsers, and late stage capitalism.
It's really simple, moving text is hard to read. As an example, turn on the local news (bear with me, I work for a TV station). You'll notice the scrolling ticker is likely simplified to focus on one headline at a time, with more pauses in between.
As others have said: scrolling text is harder to read than non-scrolling text. Scrolling text is useful in the real world when space is limited. On the web, there is no space limit, so almost no reason for scrolling text.
