Only 90s Web Developers Remember This
Zach Holman
Currently /<br>Founder of Signed and<br>Calendearing. Invested in hundreds<br>of startups via Tifo.
Previously /<br>Second engineer hired at GitHub, and advised GitLab ahead of their IPO.
Football /<br>Minority owner of<br>Oakland Roots (USL-C) and<br>Cagliari (Serie A).
More about Zach →
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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This
February 26, 2014
Please sign my guestbook.
Have you ever shoved a into a tag? Pixar gets all the<br>accolades today, but in the 90s this was a serious feat of computer animation.<br>By combining these two tags, you were a trailblazer. A person capable of great<br>innovation. A human being that all other human beings could aspire to.
You were a web developer in the 1990s.
With that status, you knew you were hot shit. And you brought with you a score<br>of the most fearsome technological innovations, the likes of which we haven’t<br>come close to replicating ever since.
Put down the jQuery, step away from the non-relational database: we have more<br>important things to talk about.
1x1.gif
1x1.gif should have won a fucking Grammy. Or a Pulitzer. Or Most Improved,<br>Third Grade Gym Class or something. It’s the most important achievement in<br>computer science since the linked list. It’s not the future we deserved, but<br>it’s the future we needed (until the box model fucked it all up).
If you’re not familiar with the humble 1x1.gif trick, here it is:
Can’t see it? Here, enhance:
The 1x1.gif — or spacer.gif, or transparent.gif — is just a one pixel by one<br>pixel transparent GIF. Just like the most futuristic CSS framework of today but<br>in a billionth of the file size, 1x1.gif is fully optimized for the<br>responsive web . You had to use these advanced attributes to tap into its<br>power, though:
SRC="/1x1.gif" WIDTH=150 HEIGHT=250>
By doing this you can position elements ANYWHERE ON THE PAGE. Combine this with<br>semantically-appropriate containers and you could do amazing things:
SRC="1x1.gif" WIDTH=300><br>SIZE=42>Hello welcome to my Internet Web Home
BGCOLOR=RED> SRC="/cgi/webcounter.cgi">
1x1.gif let you push elements all around the page effortlessly. To this day it<br>is the only way to vertically center elements.
Are images too advanced for you? HTML For Dummies doesn’t cover the<br>tag until chapter four? Well, you’re in luck: the tag is here!
You may be saying to yourself, “Self, I know all about HTML entity encoding.<br>What is this dastardly handsome man going on about?”
The answer, dear reasonably attractive reader, is an innovation that youth of<br>today don’t respect nearly enough: the stacked . Much like the 1x1.gif<br>trick, you can just arbitrarily scale for whatever needs you may face:
PLEASE SIGN<br> MY GUESTBOOK BELOW:
If I had a nickel for how many times I wrote in the 90s, I’d have<br>enough money to cover the monthly overage bills from AOL.
Dotted underlines, border effects
Towards the end of the golden era of HTML, CSS appeared on the scene, promising<br>a world of separating content from style, and we’ve been dealing with that<br>disaster ever since.
The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links.<br>Overnight, the entire internet converted into this sludge of a medium where text<br>looked like links and links looked like text. You had no idea where to click,<br>but hell that didn’t really matter anyway because we had developed cursor<br>effects (you haven’t lived until your mouse had a trail of twelve fireballs<br>behind it).
This was such a compelling use of advanced technology that it was literally all<br>we used CSS for initially. I even have proof from an index.shtml (fuck yes<br>SSI) file from 2000:
type="text/css"><br>a:hover {text-decoration: none; color: #000000}<br>-->
That’s it. That’s the entire — inline, of course — CSS for this file. Make sure<br>when you hover the link, remove the underline and paint it black. From this,<br>entire interactive websites are born.
DHTML
As soon as we had the technology to remove underlines from links, we decided to<br>combine it with the power to show alert("Welcome to my website!") messages on<br>page load. CSS and JavaScript joined forces to form the Technology of Terror:<br>DHTML.
DHTML, which absolutely stands for “distributed HTML” because that’s the name and this isn’t obvious bait for the no fun crowd at Hacker News, was the final feather in our cap of<br>web development tools. It would stand the test of time, ensuring that we could<br>make snowflakes fall from the top of the page, or build an accordion menu<br>animated image map, or building your own custom except using<br>semantic tags like .
DHTML helped transition web development from a hobbyist pastime into a<br>full-fledged profession. Sites like Dynamic Drive meant that instead of thinking<br>through creative solutions for problems you face, you could just copy and paste<br>this 50 line block of code and everything would be fixed. In effect, DHTML was<br>the Twitter Bootstrap of...