• jiberish@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • Kichae@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Have you considered just forcing everyone to access your sites via Internet Explorer 5.5?

            • Cabrio@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

                  • martinb@lemmy.sdf.org
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                    1 year ago

                    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.

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • traches@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          ? 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.

        • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • traches@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • candyman337@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • LeafEriksen@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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!

        • Haarukkateroitin
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          1 year ago

          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 <blink> was taken away from us!

          • smpl@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            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 table 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.

            Had to edit becase all those tags in code quotes fucked up and end tags was appended to the post… it’s a bug.

              • smpl@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 year ago

                Oh no you wouldn’t…

                • knocks on door
                • It’s the Wild Web Sheriff!
                • What the… You’ll never catch me!
                • rumble
                • a vase breaks
                • silence
                • Okay, okay I was just kidding. Tables are bad. HTML5 is the future.
                • dot20@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  “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.”

              • smpl@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • traches@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

        • Aloso@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • Aloso@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              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 sandbox attribute have a number of additional restrictions, which can be individually disabled when needed.

        • Aa!@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

        • SixTrickyBiscuits@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I believe Kingdom of Loathing used iframes extensively to achieve what looked like a “dynamic” page long before that was a thing.

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

    • swordsmanluke@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • 14th_cylon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I second this request to rewind time back to 90s, I would like to remake few life decisions I made :D