
Only 90s Web Developers Remember This - bado
http://zachholman.com/posts/only-90s-developers/
======
pvnick
> 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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010518071345/http://www.fortunecity.com/underworld/loading/884/)

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-
Tech/dp/0764...](http://www.amazon.com/Dummies-101-Html-Computer-
Tech/dp/0764500325)

~~~
chimeracoder
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](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](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch)

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

[https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.org/)

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

~~~
zarify
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.

~~~
sgift
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.

------
edu
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
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.

~~~
nailer
It was more about alignment.

------
nikatwork
_> 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>

~~~
jordanlev
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.

~~~
nikatwork
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.

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

Accessibility anyone?

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

[http://grox.net/doc/web/javascript/dynduo/](http://grox.net/doc/web/javascript/dynduo/)

~~~
smacktoward
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](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.

~~~
saraid216
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_."

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

------
mpclark
We weren't web developers back then, we were web _masters_

~~~
studio816
and we didn't build a website, we built a homepage.

~~~
furyofantares
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.

------
baby
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?

~~~
oinksoft

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

You didn't use Webmonkey?

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

------
molecule
Related Bootstrap theme: [http://code.divshot.com/geo-
bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/)

~~~
ntaso
No colored scrollbars? Or was this past 2000?

~~~
return0
Come on, that would ruin the user experience

~~~
thousande
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](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790)

------
alephnil
> 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.

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

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

~~~
snorkel
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.

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

~~~
Mandatum
I'll fund you on this.

------
EGreg
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."

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

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

~~~
gmriggs
woosh

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

------
mattgreenrocks
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](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.

~~~
eclipxe
Tables + frames!

~~~
saraid216
Who needs position: fixed when you have frames!?

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

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

~~~
Swannie
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.

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

~~~
Swannie
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.

~~~
Cacti
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.

------
bnr
I remember colored scrollbars in IE: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ie/ms531155%28v=vs.8...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ie/ms531155%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

~~~
gk1
I think the 90's in web design is like the 80's in fashion.

------
antics
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](http://blog.nullspace.io/day-208.html)

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

There is a solution!

[http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html](http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html)

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

------
jianshen
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?

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

~~~
rmc
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](http://personal.theisp.net/users/~customername/pg1.htm)

------
grownseed
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
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 ;)

~~~
iSnow
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.

------
grayrest
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.

~~~
masklinn
> * 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.

~~~
0x420
Remember scrolling text in the title tag? Quite cool, back in the era before
tabbed browsers.

------
krapp
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
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.

~~~
krapp
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.

~~~
adventured
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.

------
smokinjoe
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?

~~~
0x420
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).

~~~
Kluny
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_

------
jayvanguard
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.

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

~~~
masklinn
[http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo-
bootstrap/)

------
dev360
Screw Frontpage, it littered your markup when you went into design mode.
Hotdog Pro or Coffee Cup Editor was where it was at!

~~~
pwenzel
Nuh-uh, Allaire Homesite was the true editor!

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

------
delgaudm
Anyone else remember, Webrings?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring)

------
delgaudm
Anyone else remember Webrings?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring)

~~~
snorkel
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!

------
theminor
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"

~~~
krapp
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.

------
david927
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.

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

~~~
snorkel
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?"

~~~
joshvm
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..

------
computerslol
This post makes me happy :).

&nbsp; 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 :).

~~~
malbs
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.

~~~
Cacti
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.

~~~
malbs
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

------
return0
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)?)

~~~
AznHisoka
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.

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

~~~
AznHisoka
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

------
AznHisoka
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.

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

------
powrtoch
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.

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

~~~
panzi
powrtoch was talking about vertically centering.

------
Mizza
Oh god. I still use &nbsp; for spacing things. Like, all the time.

I'm a terrible person.

~~~
jamesbritt
For some reason I have &#

~~~
pigDisgusting
...do you mean &#160; ???

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

~~~
jamesbritt
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.

------
yusukeshinyama
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.

------
snorkel
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
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

~~~
tripzilch
... 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.

------
steverit
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](http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm)

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

~~~
hodgesmr
Pretty sure that was part of the joke.

------
jefflinwood
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.

------
p4bl0
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!

~~~
err4nt
preloaders for your gallery :)

------
tremendo
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.

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

<SCRIPT><!-- self.defaultStatus="Welcome to my website!" //\--></SCRIPT>

------
vcherubini
I thought DHTML stood for Dynamic HTML?

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

------
glassx
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.thefwa.com/flash10/gabo.html)
\- [http://www.eye4u.com/home/](http://www.eye4u.com/home/)

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

------
xFFEE
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>

------
at-fates-hands
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.

------
swalsh
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20000229044717/http://www.msn.com/)?

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

------
donmb
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?

<BGSOUND SRC="aladdin.mid" LOOP=10>

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

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030927154612/http://www.ghostn...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030927154612/http://www.ghostnetworks.com/)

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.

------
PhrosTT
<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>

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

~~~
grayrest

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

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

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

[http://caniuse.com/](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.

------
ghinda
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](http://www.effectmaker.com/gallery/jsslidemenu/index.html)

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

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

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

------
dabent
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.

~~~
jamesbritt
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.

------
LukeB_UK
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!

------
tragic
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.

------
pirateking
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.

------
Jack000
Don't forget the w3c valid xhtml badges. Though that's more early-2000s

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

------
dhimes
_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!

------
neovive
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.

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

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

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

------
_kfb
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.

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

~~~
jimhart3000
A few years ago?! We're still using a lot of that for emails now!

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

~~~
bliti
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).

------
10feet
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.

------
conradfr
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

------
gerjomarty
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](http://digiauk.tripod.com/index2.shtm)

------
cine
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.

------
ja27
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 ...

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

------
Swizec
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?

------
incision
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](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565921757.do)

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

~~~
stevekemp
> (location bar?)

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

------
bliti
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... :)

------
runewell
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.

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

------
yawz
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.

~~~
dalke
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.

------
rangibaby
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/](http://labrocca.com/htmlementary/)

------
jbeja
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 :(.

------
yeukhon
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!

------
snorkel

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

------
skyebook
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](http://www.goer.org/htmlhorror/htmlhorror1.html)

------
kayoone
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 ;)

~~~
ratscabies
[http://www.carnagge.com/](http://www.carnagge.com/)

------
GBond
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

------
blue1
&nbsp; is an entity, not a tag.

------
brightsize
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.

------
thekevan
No mention of the dancing baby?

------
mattlutze
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.

------
carljoseph
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!

------
RoryH
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.

------
Cacti
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.

~~~
peckrob
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...

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

------
studio816
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.

~~~
alttab
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.

~~~
studio816
that... makes me feel very old, and I'm 32 :(

------
masswerk
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?)

------
ksmsjm
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

~~~
saraid216
Blink tags were annoying even then.

------
joshvm
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!

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
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.

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

------
ivan78
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?

~~~
georgiecasey
i give up, tell us why!

~~~
ivan78
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.

~~~
georgiecasey
i was actually going to guess this. very interesting.

------
alinspired
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";`

------
jrlocke
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.

------
Rumudiez
... 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!

------
msvalkon
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.

------
agumonkey
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.

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

~~~
Rangi42
I always used <table frame="border" rules="both"> for 1px borders.

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

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

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

------
manuw
That's awesome [http://dhtmlconf.com/](http://dhtmlconf.com/)

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

~~~
Cacti
Still amazed to this day that animated gifs are everywhere.

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

------
lwhi
DHTML actually stood for Dynamic HTML.

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

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

------
pikachu_is_cool
[http://lard.5u.com/](http://lard.5u.com/)

------
gregimba
Editing pages with notepad.exe

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

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

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

------
mhartl
I wrote programs to write &nbsp;s. Surely I am going to Hell.

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

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

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

------
Datsundere
It should stop when the mouse is over the marquee!

------
faddotio
SITE CREATED WITH _NOTEPAD_ (THE RIGHT WAY)

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

------
pickpuck
Zach Holman, present this at DHTML Conf!

------
clintonc
Man, I _loved_ buttons.

This post made with vim.

------
ighost
Hilarious, but needs more vbscript.

------
lsdafjklsd
OR ANYONE STILL DOING HTML EMAILS

~~~
ceejayoz
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.

~~~
lsdafjklsd
Yea, the &nbsp; and 1px transparent png's are your best friend in that world.

------
t0mislav
This is so true, so funny! :D

------
bujatt
oh my God, _web rings_...

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

------
pyrocat
Thanks buzzfeed.

------
peterchon
this is the single greatest blog post ever.

------
grantlmiller
this is such a click-bait title

------
RawData
Love this!

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

