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...

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

https://archive.org/web/geocities.php

There was a huge push on archiveteam to scrape as much as they could before it was shut down. If it was saved it'll have the same url on reocities

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities

The file was huge, about several hundred gigabyte. I didn't download it, because I don't have enough space and downloading it would take ages with my slow connection.

On http://reocities.com/ you can browse through some of the old pages and sites, but many things are broken now, missing images.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000510132913/http://poketown.o...

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

Maybe Pokemon can be the new Hello World.

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.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070515090557/http://www.maxpag...

SSI changed my life, and I coded a 50 page website in a textarea. on 28.8. In the snow. Without shoes.

Not much has changed. I use vim now.

What a sucker I was! Good thing PHP came along and taught us all what true webmastery is.

1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.

I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.

What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.

This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.

Still after all these years, the scars earned in web development projects, make me jump of joy when I get to do native desktop stuff instead.

It's not nearly as bad as the bad old days so to speak, and a lot of things can be very clean and elegant.

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.

Can't forget about the Paint Shop Pro animated graphics!

[1] http://pika299.tripod.com/

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/

And my OpenGL driver for the Genesis engine.. the download zip of source code even still works:

http://gmcbay.tripod.com/oldindex.html

Pretty funny trip down nostalgia lane, including a reference to my very old gfm@my-deja.com email address... I still miss you, Deja News. Google Groups is not the same.

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).

http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Internet_User's_Guide_and...

ahh... memories :)

  <p><img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7"></p>
  <!-- lol yeah i'm base64 encoding 1x1.gif isn't that fucking dope? -->

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>

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>

What really grates is that the same people will then often use a <ul> to make a hover menu, which is completely hypocritical.

Accessibility anyone?

-- <table width="80%"><!-- dynamic --><tr>

-- <td width="300">fixed"</td>

-- <td width="*">dynamic</td>

-- </tr><table>

Actually, it can. I did it for you:

Image: http://i.imgur.com/l5GPLNC.png

Source: https://gist.github.com/Imdsm/9226944

.container {width: 80%;} .left {float:left; width: 300px; background: yellow;} .right {margin-left: 300px; background: red;}

    .thing {
      position: relative;
    }
    .thing .child {
      width: 50px;
      height: 50px;
      position: absolute;
      top: 50%;
      margin-top: -25px; /* half of height */
    }

http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/

Not terrible but still a hack. Should just be a simple way of doing this by now... Still, this technique is better than a spacer gif!

CSS is perfectly fine for fixed size layouts but it completely sucks for dynamic ones, especially if you want to mix fixed and dynamic elements. Tables OTOH handle these layout scenarios simply, concisely and without hacks.

CSS is really botched and holding us back at this point. Fortunately it is slowly improving (eg. * { box-sizing: border-box } and the flex-box), but still...

http://grox.net/doc/web/javascript/dynduo/

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.

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."

I remember learning Java from a book, and many of my lightbulb moments about programming came from reading code, not writing it.

  ns4 = (document.layers)? true:false
  ie4 = (document.all)? true:false

  if (ns4||ie4) document.writeln('<DIV ID="bulge"><IMG SRC="bulge.gif" WIDTH=49 HEIGHT=148 BORDER=0></DIV>')
  else alert("You must have Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0\nto view the examples in this site.")

EDIT: Holy crap... I still have the bookmark for DD (and JavaScript Kit at the old http://www.wsabstract.com domain) in an "Imported" bookmarks folder in Chrome. I'm not sure how many browsers those have been through over the years.

But you gained a lot of arcane knowledge in the end, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.infosystems.www...

It was a very different meaning from today's "rockstar ninja".

[1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565923256.do

- 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?

Apparently that still works in Safari http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/cut11.shtml

- using as much code from dynamicdrive.com as possible

- .dhtml

- pasting little flourishes like .·. .:· everywhere

- phpBB and invision power board

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

This is what it does to the BS3 docs page: http://i.imgur.com/VQNlsZy.png

lol, fuck. I remember every goddamned thing on that page.

The dude coding in the lower right was a nice touch. Haven't seen that in a long time.

Noise filter, sheer, blur, fuck with the levels, colorize with a horribly bright shade of something. If you fucked it up bad enough you couldn't tell it wasn't repeating. 90x90 and 120x120 all the way down.

That and making an amazing image with a completely pointless sun glare filter and then cutting the image into cubes so you could display it on the site. Thats how "consultants" overcame HTML limitations for a long ass time.

Discussion is still going strong in Bugzilla, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790

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.

Ahh, and I see now why it would have been so hard to author - it was based on motion capture.

(This must be what it feels like to realize you're old...)

Hmm, right. That got tiresome after a bit, so "telnet archie.mcgill.ca" and do an archie search.

I remember that by 1992 the index overflowed signed 32 bit int and started giving "-45%" complete.

Of course we're not old. Those were the ones who could replace a VAX disk pack, and who had to log in via dedicated terminals instead of dial-up via a PC. :)

Now, I think WebGL is the new VRML.

Hard to believe it was 20 years ago.

And that we're finally coming full circle back to it.

Shit, I'm getting old.

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.

That was a nightmare of support issues on a few apps for me.

I don't think you need to be a 90s developer for that. Look at the HTML of the website you're currently using.

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.

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

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/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20001019064945/http://www.bratta...

You were a web developer if you'd torn apart and rebuild Matt's Forum, Poll, and other widgets.

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.

The request is still being discussed in Bugzilla :) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790

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

There is a solution!

http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html

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.

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

* 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.

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.

* Creating gradient text using one <font color="..."> for each letter. http://jsfiddle.net/A2VCE/

* Putting text in <noscript> and <noframes> tags to support old browsers

* Add "lowsrc" attribute to <img> because the larger image would take too long to load.

* List detailed hardware specs for the web server on the "about us" page.

And webrings. Oh god webrings...

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.

...or the thousands of other badges that I, for whatever reason had to shoehorn into my website?

"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

You couldn't get away with that now though. Actually they didn't let me get away with it for long.

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.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/hr.html

It's all about that terrible blue button in Dreamweaver that animated concentric circles when you hovered over it..

&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 :).

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.

Once I connected it took almost 2 hours just to start Outlook.

Thankfully there's mobile tethering/hot-spotting now

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)?)

Actually, name a generation over the last few centuries which hasn't seen the birth of a dozen groundbreaking technologies.

More accurately, the "life changing" effects of new technologies (which are often a result of them being synthesized with other technologies and/or applied outside of their original context) took a lot longer to develop, largely because the spread of awareness of new technologies took longer. Which is why the frequency of the appearance of those life-changing effects of technology pretty consistently has increased as the speed and reach of information dissemination technologies has increased.

More specifically, consider a 25 year old resident of NYC in 1964 - a member of the jet age, the atomic age, and the transistor era, embedded in a time of great cultural change in American life - and bring them to NYC of the present.

How long do you think it would take for them to get up to speed? What are the "significant life-changing technologies" they would need to learn in order to survive and do well?

Consider then a 25 year old resident of NYC in 1875 and bring them to 1925. I think it would be much harder for that person to adapt than the person from 1964.

Here are some of the significant changes around the turn of the century.

The linotype machine completely transformed the news industry. Before then, no newspaper had more than 8 pages.

Oceanic telegraph lines were in place, so the explosion of Krakatoa became world-wide news within a day. That is, the speed of information was already pretty high. There were 14 million telegraphs daily by the early 1900s, or 1 for every 100 people.

Books and magazines provided a lot of information quickly about the latest inventions and ideas. Take a look at Popular Mechanics from 1905, at http://books.google.se/books?id=S98DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA93&hl=sv&s... for the news. Page 35 has a series of books for home-based education, from stair building to telephones to law school.

For the first time in the US we had more Americans living in cities than on farms. The end of the frontier era lead to Turner's Thesis, which is the basis for the "Frontier" in "Electronic Frontier Foundation."

Dense cities became possible because Otis elevator (1853) and iron-framed building (1864) lead to the first skyscraper, at an amazing height of 10 stories (1884–1885). Commercial use of reinforced concrete also started at around that time.

We developed new methods of information organization, including the Dewey Decimal Classification (okay, that's from the late 1870s), and the vertical file system. The Hollerith punch cards were invented for the 1890 census.

For the first time we had night life, because limelight and electric lights were much cheaper than candles. The first night club was Webster Hall in 1886.

For the first time, humans could fly against the wind, in both airships and airplanes.

For the first time, women could vote.

The steam shovel was invented in 1839 but it wasn't until after steel cable of the 1870s that lead to the first effective shovels of the 1880s. Compare the use of forced labor for the Suez canal to the Marion steam shovel used the Panama Canal a few decades later.

Speaking of the Panama Canal, we discovered that mosquitoes were a disease vector for malaria and yellow fever. Previously it was attributed to "bad air" or an impure lifestyle.

In my own field of chemical information, Beilstein's Handbook of Organic Chemistry started in 1881 and IUPAC nomenclature started in 1892.

Bakelite (1907) was "the material of 1000 uses" and it was used everywhere.

It wasn't until 1912 or so that lipstick became fashionable, and for the flappers of the 1920s it was a sign of independence.

It used to be safe to walk on the streets without worrying much, because most traffic were people, horses, and bikes (the 1890s was the 'Golden Age of Bicycles'). Cars changed that. The concept that streets are only for cars, and that walking across the street is "jaywalking" and wrong or illegal, started in the 1910s.

Do you really think the last 50 years are as disruptive as that fin de siècle era? Why?

Charlemagne. Fucking Charlemagne. Seriously, Western Europe emerging as a political entity.

The various Viking invasions, which end up having a major impact on European trade and English history (and thus by extension, American history).

The 9th century was kind of a big deal.

In 867, the Macedonian dynasty took over Byzantium and started its golden age.

The 860s was the start of the First Bulgarian Empire. Bulgaria became Christian (864). The Cyrillic alphabet was developed shortly afterwards as a written script for church books.

The Muslims conquest of Sicily started in 827. They conquered Crete in 820.

Leo VI formally abolished the Roman consular dating system in 888. The 800s is when we started to use Anno Domini widely. (BTW, Leo VI also composed hymns which are still sung in the Eastern Orthodox Church.)

The Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution started in China in 845, in part to get the money needed to pay off the 843 victory against the Uyghurs. The fall of the Uyghur Khaganate caused the Uyghurs to migrate eastwards.

Judaization of the Khazars mostly took place in the 800s.

The 800s is the Pueblo I Era, when the Ancient Pueblo population (the Anasazi) constructed and lived in pueblos. 850 is the start of a major drought in the area, which lasted for 50 years.

It was also the terminal classic period of Mesoamerica. The oldest date found at Chichen Itza is equivalent to 832 AD.

FWIW, the world population then was about 225 million. It's about 7 billion now. That's a 28x difference, which surely affects how much change can occur.

My thesis is that the rate of technological breakthroughs has been very high for the last 200 years.

Notice the part about "last few centuries"?

12 is more than a few. If you're going to bend the rules then so will I. :)

The development of adobe building technology is both literally and metaphorically groundbreaking. These are still known as the pueblo dwellers because of that technology.

A new writing system and a new banking system are also technological developments.

My thesis is that social impact of the technological developments in the 50 years around 1900 was more than the development of the last 50 years. As supporting evidence, I propose that return0's statement "how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology" reveals that there are not that many new groundbreaking technologies these days. Someone from 100 years ago could name a dozen such changes.

How often can one not? And, since technology advanced to the point where information about such a groundbreaking technology gets to the whole globe in relatively short time, its been pretty hard not to be aware of it.

http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/demos/vertic...

jsfiddle itself doesn't work in IE8, so hier is a direct link: http://fiddle.jshell.net/QVQLN/show/

I'm a terrible person.