WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 7300429

Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

710 points| bado | 12 years ago |zachholman.com

394 comments

order
[+] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
> 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...

[+] drv|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jvuonger|12 years ago|reply
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/

[+] jwdunne|12 years ago|reply
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).

[+] jotato|12 years ago|reply
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 :)

[+] chimeracoder|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] edu|12 years ago|reply
Respect.

  <p><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7"></p>
  <!-- lol yeah i'm base64 encoding 1x1.gif isn't that fucking dope? -->
[+] xutopia|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] nikatwork|12 years ago|reply
> 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>
[+] mpclark|12 years ago|reply
We weren't web developers back then, we were webmasters
[+] baby|12 years ago|reply
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?

[+] alephnil|12 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] sanswork|12 years ago|reply
Remember when VRML was going to be the next big thing and we were all going to be moving through 3d websites?
[+] EGreg|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] mattgreenrocks|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] tracker1|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] mynameishere|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] eclipxe|12 years ago|reply
Tables + frames!
[+] pauljonas|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] dkoch|12 years ago|reply
What about CGI scripts from Matt's Script Archive [1] which amazingly is still alive?

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

[+] dasil003|12 years ago|reply
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/

[+] Swannie|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] Cacti|12 years ago|reply
Holy shit. That place was a mecca.
[+] antics|12 years ago|reply
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

[+] jianshen|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] grownseed|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jhuckestein|12 years ago|reply
If you care about typesetting and legibility, you sometimes really do need &nbsp;. It prevents the browser from inserting a line break between two words that belong together, like February&nbsp;26th or Louis&nbsp;XIV. IIRC nbsp is short for non-breaking space.

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

[+] grayrest|12 years ago|reply
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.

[+] krapp|12 years ago|reply
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...

[+] knieveltech|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] Meekro|12 years ago|reply
Tripod let you run perl scripts?