My first software dev job was in the 90's writing PHP for a mom and pop ISP that was trying to get into app development. It was originally supposed to be Perl, the job interview was something like:
Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site
Owner: You wrote this?
Me: Yeah.
Owner: This is in Perl?
Me: Yeah.
So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those pages.
How hard could that be?
So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and s all over the place and I remember looking at it and thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck.
But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good.
The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9 an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.
Back in the day, HTML usually came with its own built-in version control. You could view source and see exactly what thought process the web designer (read: the person who figured out HomeSite first) had gone through, like:
<font color=“red”>
<font color=“blue”>
<font color=“green”>
Hi there
</font>
</font>
</font>
because the editors didn’t actually understand HTML beyond what was required to wrap a tag around a block of text.
I bet this is what a word doc looks like under the hood.
Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out.
We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch.
Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.
Great story. I feel like many of us from the 90s have similar stories.
I was a CS undergrad, and was introduced to someone who needed a software person. Got hired at $8/hour part time to write VB, Access, and MSSQL software - none of which I had ever touched. Same deal, either I figure it out or he would let me go. Couple weeks later my boss came in, loosely described an application, and then asked if I could have something demoable in 2 hours. He had a client meeting and need to show something to get partial payment. Got it done and almost immediately got a raise to $12/hour. Obviously the place had a lot of issues and was out of business in the next couple years, but it gave me the mentality early on of execute and ship. Good times indeed.
And yeah...I was waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant a month before...
Love your story, it reminds me of my first long term software gig, where I was actually stacking boxes and writing software. I was managing an eCommerce site for a local gym! Best of both worlds?
I think everyone should get some grassroots software work under their belt, it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.
I don't want to soapbox too much, but it is part of my hope for the eventually reduction of software salaries, so that software can become a more integrated and boutique part of life. There are so many problems that would be better solved with small scale software instead of impersonal SaaS.
Yeah. I'm enjoying the current inflated salaries but this is not sustainable, and it really shuts smaller, non-software companies out of having inhouse fulltime developers.
it's a really different experience working as a
team member in an unrelated industry and providing
a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.
This can be the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. It all depends on whether or not management is willing to learn about how the software development process works and adapt to it.
I remember the days from 2000-2015, I worked at a few places like this. Doing "revolutionary" things like actually introducing source control, offsite backups, etc. to places that had never heard of such things.
At some places this was challenging, but rewarding. At other places ownership was constantly aghast when they had to shell out for some random software licenses or SaaS subscriptions. I view it as a part of my job to explain and justify expenditures, but going to war with management over every rando $100 "what the FUCK is 'git hub???'" purchase gets old fast.
I hear you - the 90s were insane. In the space of six months I went from a factory worker (12 hour shifts, all night-shift, 7 days a week) to a computer lab assistant to a entry-level software developer.
First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to build the CGI binaries.
Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating around everywhere[1].
I remember being so excited when I figured out how to hide the borders of frames and do a layout with nested tables.
Probably the one trick I learned back then that I still use today is naming the target in links. I remember noticing Yahoo doing it on their Fantasy Football setup so that if you clicked on the news beside a bunch of different players and clicked the same one more than once, it would only load the player into its specific window. Since I’ve always been a person that opens tons of links as I’m going through a page and then reads each of them after, it was nice to not have duplicate windows (tabs) everywhere.
Still works and to this day I never use target=“_blank”.
In fairness it isn’t a great filter. As someone that had a similar story - I got a very well paying job out of high school based in part on some home grown apps 20ish years ago - the field of people doing small scale stuff was small and any basic CRUD app, let alone embedded hardware hacking made you instantly look like a wizard - since getting started then was much harder - any output was proof of a certain level of skill in acquiring knowledge that was above average even if the overall scope wasn’t huge. In this day of Arduinos/RPi and git pull boilerplate, a small app or hardware project doesn’t prove much of anything. The scale of side project to really differentiate is beyond what most people reasonably have time for if they wish to have a life. I think compensated take home assignments still have some merit though.
FWIW, that's how I structure my interviews typically, so they still exist in some places.
For anyone reading along I highly encourage that; there's way more signal to noise hearing about some project they worked on and why they were proud enough to put it on their resume than 'did they remember the algorithmic call/response'. You can't beat an almost post mortem discussion where you let the interviewee lead on what they think went well and what they'd have done differently with hindsight.
I try to drag this out of candidates, but it's often very hard... Surprisingly few people actually code outside their jobs/education... Job code is obviously a no-go, and academics are usually pre-skeletoned work, So when I ask them to show me their favorite project, they often draw a blank...
I was lucky and I did a side project my last year of college abusing Hadoop to make a web scraper & analysis tool on one. Probably got me my first 2 jobs because I LOVED to talk about that project, and it let me break out of my fearful and introverted shell to show a wider range of skills
I got hired on at a Fortune 500 company in the early 2000s. One of the reasons I've stuck around (besides the great pay and benefits) is that I've read all the horror stories of leetcode interviews. I have zero interest in participating in that nonsense. One benefit of this is, when I am interviewing people to fill development position, I never do any of that leetcode nonsense.
Requiring coding tests etc just wasn't filtering more than random chance when I was hiring. I ended up pulling in people who had the most preposterous CVs to see what they were actually like.
One guy was a ninja. A black belt in ninjitsu, apparently. I asked him about his ninja skills (he looked like Harry Knowles). He said he could make himself invisible. I was like O_O. I asked him to demonstrate. He said he couldn't do it right now as we already knew he was there. I told him to leave the meeting room and "come back in invisible." He said it didn't work like that. I asked how it works. He said "Let's say I'm at a party.. I can enter the room and walk completely through the crowded room and not a single person will notice me." I think I know what was happening....
One problem is that the big companies (that, for the most part, pay the big bucks and people care about and other small companies look to) are market movers. If they are known to be doing some alternative to leetcode then leetcode-type websites and study programs will pop right up to optimize for whatever new metric they have. If they start to prioritize things you've built over ability to perform, you can bet your bottom dollar that within a week there will be a million guides on crafting the optimal cookiecutter project to get in the door at Facebook available on the web. And the signal will lose its value. A signal has to be costly to acquire and algorithmic prowess, although made easier through things like leetcode, is costly for everyone to acquire which is why it holds its value.
I'm thinking of changing jobs and the need for me to do leetcode and answer trivia gotcha questions vexes me. More than 10 years of professional experience and like 5-6 years of hobbyist experience as a web master for 00's websites, and managing ecommerce sites with >$1M's in revenue doesn't count for anything.
At my first webdev job (1998) I built websites for seafood companies. Microsoft FrontPage was the tool my boss handed me. I was appalled at the HTML it was producing, and succeeded in convincing him to let me use Dreamweaver instead; for a 20th century WYSIWYG editor, it was pretty good.
The best was when they wanted you to throw a curved border around something in an age before floats or border radii. You could do it multiple different ways, but usually it just involved slicing up an image and throwing the image elements into a table which wrapped your content.
> I miss the good ol’ days. Today we have abstractions on top of abstractions on top of JavaScript, of all things
It seems I learnt HTML just between these two eras. After the , 1px spacers and tables, and before the piles of abstractions.
People cared about doing well formed XHTML and having those W3C Valid XHTML badges, and also those "install Firefox" buttons.
This was short so today everything looks ugly to me, old and new, in different ways.
I still use (polyglot) XHTML5 (HTML5 if I don't control everything being input) and avoid frontend frameworks and web fonts when I get to decide. This is a world where implementing a search bar for people who haven't discovered CTRL+F yet takes 30 lines of dumb Javascript and filters 200 items in 1 second on a slow computer without any caching trick and that does not require minifiers and bundlers. Which does not actually sound impressive, or shouldn't anyway. A world where when you disable Javascript, the page is still perfectly readable. A world where a silly mistake in the HTML markup is noticed.
To build an actual web application where it does not makes much sense to have the content as a web page, I started liking Svelte but I'll still at least consider doing things by manipulating the DOM directly before deciding.
Wow. That took me back. All those things, every day. And table layouts of course. And let's not forget slicing images, and slapping those into tables too. If I remember rightly, Photoshop had an "export to slices" thing built in. Amazing. Loved it.
And of course one of the biggest issues with today's web: you can't just view source and copy paste. You're in the land of chasing back up CSS files, js libraries, or finding yourself unable to steal an image because it's not just an image you can right click on any more.
My highschool computer curriculum was basically a hacker school program for web dev stretched across three years (senior year we did VB6). I managed to be impressive because I would dissect web pages to learn their tricks. I think I must be the only one (or if not, at least among the first) in our level to pull off columned layout without CSS. I figured out <table border="0"></table> all by myself, neither the books nor the teachers taught you that. And I did that by reading source code on IE5---developer tools weren't a thing then!
In our second year, one of the exercises was to recreate Yahoo's log-in page. I got closest exactly because of the above. I still feel smug remembering this.
I was always jealous of schools that would teach some sort of programming or web design. My high school computer class (each year) was learning how to use MS Office. Which was probably the most useful instruction the rest of those kids could have received... but I wanted to learn to program.
So, the computer class instructor sat me down and asked me what I knew about programming. "I can use Perl", I said (I had read Perl For Dummies, v5.00502 edition). So he told me to make an online calendar for the school. So, I did. No instruction... just figured it out as I went. And that's how I learned that managing and displaying events in arbitrary times and dates is harder than P=NP.
Turns out that giving me that project was intended to save the school from having to pay for a real online calendar.
I used to build entire sites in photoshop. It produced horrendous mark-up, but streamlined the whole design process, and allowed for really beautiful graphic designs. Haven't done web development in well over a decade, but I assume from your comment this is no longer a thing?
Thanks to this post and internet archive's wayback machine I just had a trip back to the end of the 90s to some of the web pages I wrote these days for a local PR agency. I was surprised to see that they still render reasonably well on my smart phone. Nice dose of nostalgia
There's browser extensions that will convert a whole page as it is loaded in the browser to an image file. For ever-scrolling pages you have to manually stop it.
Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>.
I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.
Am I the only one who found the term DHTML to be one of the most useless initialisms that came from web development?
I remember seeing "DHTML" still being thrown around as late as 2005, but knowing that I could refer to the components of a webpage as "DHTML" never seemed to have any sort of utility. I never cared that I could refer to the markup as being dynamic. Big deal. What scripts and applets could I add to make things move?
Of course now we're still stuck with this "HTML5" canard that won't die because nontechnical people seem to believe it's more advanced than "HTML".
That reminds me of the time someone told me they were building web pages in HotMail. I was like, “WTF?” And then he spelled out HotMail for me, “HTML, HotMail”. I was like, “oh”.
Yeah, I clicked over to see if this was a joke or a mistake. I'm still honestly not sure.
It was definitely "Dynamic HTML". Just a few weeks ago, I threw out a bunch of old issues of MacWorld... one of them had a cover article on the then-new technology of DHTML.
The awesome thing about that period was how we learned. You'd be on a web page, see something funky (positioning, rounded corners, etc) and be like "how the heck did they do that?".
Then you do the ol' "View Source" and now that technique is in your toolkit. In fact you'd prob head right over to your geocities site and try it out right away.
Yeah this was awesome time and it did teach you more than just the trick, navigating unknown codebases, extracting the meaningful parts of a non trivial piece in f code…
I really think the web community lost something with the transition to compiled uglified js and css…. Sure google will show you to some code if you manage to put what you are looking for into words but that isn’t always easy. Pitty that there is no standardised solution to publish the source along with the Minimized script nowadays.
For CSS and HTML it's still easy and even easier to do so by right clicking and selecting "Inspect element" (something we didn't have back then). I often do that to understand how a page is setup and I don't see what's so hard about it it.
For JS it's a different story of course but it was never that easy to begin with since the code that affects an element can be anywhere.
They have missed out Perl CGI scripts from “Matts Script Archive”[0]!
I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes).
Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms!
Edit: wow cgi proxy has been updated as recently at 2019! [1]
CGIProxy was the start of a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between the IT staff and a group of students at my school. It started with finding public hosts ("inurl:nph-proxy.cgi"), and quickly evolved to self-hosting CGIProxy on custom domains/ports. Portable Firefox could be used to sidestep some of the filtering software, until they started auto-closing any window with "Firefox" in the title and .exes called firefox.exe (both of which could also be worked around). It culminated in them creating their own domain admin account so they could disable most of the blocking/monitoring software (the main domain admin's account password being "school" made this _much_ easier than it should have been).
They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "<surname>'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.
Around the time the word 'blog' was being coined, I did terrible things to the guestbook CGI script from Matt's Script Archive in order to make it easy for a small staff of writers to update a news site I had started about Nine Inch Nails. I later migrated to a Perl Script called 'News Publisher' by someone named Grant Williams - it's basically a static site generator that runs on Perl and flatfiles. Around 2008, I ported the whole thing to C# & SQL Server, but in the process, refactored and cleaned up the Perl code, and figured - why bother with the big underlying shift? So it's still what powers that NIN website two decades later.
Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game, right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded UltimateBB.
Matt's Script Archive is still live. God alone knows why, but it is. You can still download wwwboard (even though FF warns about an insecure connection), it was last updated in 2002.
... and if you search "wwwboard" apparently you can still find some in the wild.
I was a high school dropout working in a skate shop in the mid 90s, teaching myself web design via view-source, and the owner of the shop asked if I could build him a little website for the store. This was back when only big companies had websites, so him having one for his little skate shop was mind blowing to everyone. I had no idea what I was doing... just copy/pasting various bits I liked from big websites like Microsoft.com or telco websites as they had the "nicest" sites at the time.
It got me poached by a media company who was all-in on the dotcom boom hype and convinced we'd all be billionaires within a year. They paid me stupid amounts of money (for a dropout skater who refused to wear a button up shirt to work) and I cranked out crappy HTML templates for them to sell to people who had "an idea and some money", investing their life savings in the "next big thing". Always felt dirty working there, so I wasn't upset when they went bust and ended up owing millions to creditors and losing everything they had.
That all led to a 20 year career in web stuff for F500s and Government as I self-taught my way through web design, to graphic design, to front end dev, to back end dev, then to netsec. To this day I never finished school or got any qualifications, new jobs would come to me via old jobs. Something I think would be impossible in IT today.
I left tech about 10 years ago now and mostly work on old cars and be a dad, reading HN to see how much things have changed and for the nostalgia trips like this. It's insane seeing how different things are when it wasn't "that" long ago. I can't think of any other industry that can be so unrecognisable within such a short timeframe.
> The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links.
I don't know how this trend came to be. I fought it for as long as I could, links are underlined and when you hovered them the underline would go away to make it extra clear this is an interactive element. I considered it a staple of good design. Why did we remove the underline?
Most sites invert that effect: hovering reveals the underline. The link is still distinguishable by color, still apparently interactive by hover effect, and preserves underlining as a styling option in the text, which is preferable.
That and the different colour for "visited" links. This site is a good example where a different colour for a link you've clicked would be really useful - but it's strangely lacking. Every time I click a link on HN to read an article, and come back to HN to read the comments discussing said article, I have to scan the whole HN page again to find the link. It's frustrating.
Readit News
Me: demos CRUD app for keeping track of my record collection, hosted on a free site
Owner: You wrote this?
Me: Yeah.
Owner: This is in Perl?
Me: Yeah.
So I got hired. The day I got there, he told me they were going to use PHP instead of Perl. Sure, cool, whatever. He told me that I had to start being productive in the first couple weeks or he would have to let me go, couldn't afford to keep people that weren't working out. I was down with that. He had some HTML pages that he had created in a WYSIWYG editor, I think it was Dreamweaver, and I was going to add some PHP scripting to those pages.
How hard could that be?
So I get to work and open these HTML files and I don't even remember exactly, I think like the login page HTML was 20 pages of code long, maybe I'm exaggerating, I've blocked most of it out of my memory but I seem to remember nested tables inside of nested tables inside of nested tables with spacer GIFs and s all over the place and I remember looking at it and thinking: What. The. Actual. Fuck.
But I did it! I managed to get the guy to take a look at what the editor he was using actually created and get him to simplify some things, I fixed a few bugs and was working on features and he came in around noon and told me you know what I said about being productive in the first few weeks? Forget about that, we're good.
The week before I was doing manual labor in a factory. It was like going from the 1800s to the 2000s over a weekend. I made $9 an hour, less than I was making stacking boxes on pallets, but of course totally worth it in the long run. Good times.
Especially if you see what kind of crap code something like frontpage produced. Lots of boilerplate muck and stuff cancelling each other out.
We used to call it Strontpage at a place I worked. Stront means shit in Dutch.
Dreamweaver was so much better and it embraced CSS instead of trying to avoid it. Though I liked coding in just an editor, for me as a non-graphics person it was nice to have WYSIWYG. Of course soon after that actual graphics people started doing that work but in the beginning it was all techies.
I was a CS undergrad, and was introduced to someone who needed a software person. Got hired at $8/hour part time to write VB, Access, and MSSQL software - none of which I had ever touched. Same deal, either I figure it out or he would let me go. Couple weeks later my boss came in, loosely described an application, and then asked if I could have something demoable in 2 hours. He had a client meeting and need to show something to get partial payment. Got it done and almost immediately got a raise to $12/hour. Obviously the place had a lot of issues and was out of business in the next couple years, but it gave me the mentality early on of execute and ship. Good times indeed.
And yeah...I was waiting tables in a fine dining restaurant a month before...
I think everyone should get some grassroots software work under their belt, it's a really different experience working as a team member in an unrelated industry and providing a unique value to an otherwise non-software company.
I don't want to soapbox too much, but it is part of my hope for the eventually reduction of software salaries, so that software can become a more integrated and boutique part of life. There are so many problems that would be better solved with small scale software instead of impersonal SaaS.
I remember the days from 2000-2015, I worked at a few places like this. Doing "revolutionary" things like actually introducing source control, offsite backups, etc. to places that had never heard of such things.
At some places this was challenging, but rewarding. At other places ownership was constantly aghast when they had to shell out for some random software licenses or SaaS subscriptions. I view it as a part of my job to explain and justify expenditures, but going to war with management over every rando $100 "what the FUCK is 'git hub???'" purchase gets old fast.
Overall though, I am now a little nostalgic...
First day on dev job, the owner displays a hodgepodge of Perl code that was originally an open-source thing called MRTG (before network admins heavily modified it), tasked me with porting it from Solaris to Windows NT and using MSVC 5.0 to build the CGI binaries.
Good times were had by all due to the boom money floating around everywhere[1].
[1] Well, until the bust came in late 90s :-)
Probably the one trick I learned back then that I still use today is naming the target in links. I remember noticing Yahoo doing it on their Fantasy Football setup so that if you clicked on the news beside a bunch of different players and clicked the same one more than once, it would only load the player into its specific window. Since I’ve always been a person that opens tons of links as I’m going through a page and then reads each of them after, it was nice to not have duplicate windows (tabs) everywhere.
Still works and to this day I never use target=“_blank”.
For anyone reading along I highly encourage that; there's way more signal to noise hearing about some project they worked on and why they were proud enough to put it on their resume than 'did they remember the algorithmic call/response'. You can't beat an almost post mortem discussion where you let the interviewee lead on what they think went well and what they'd have done differently with hindsight.
I was lucky and I did a side project my last year of college abusing Hadoop to make a web scraper & analysis tool on one. Probably got me my first 2 jobs because I LOVED to talk about that project, and it let me break out of my fearful and introverted shell to show a wider range of skills
One guy was a ninja. A black belt in ninjitsu, apparently. I asked him about his ninja skills (he looked like Harry Knowles). He said he could make himself invisible. I was like O_O. I asked him to demonstrate. He said he couldn't do it right now as we already knew he was there. I told him to leave the meeting room and "come back in invisible." He said it didn't work like that. I asked how it works. He said "Let's say I'm at a party.. I can enter the room and walk completely through the crowded room and not a single person will notice me." I think I know what was happening....
But telling to story how young horny me built porn sites and learned SEO the hard way was actually a selling point so far.
Most people don’t have much to show.
IIRC, one of the early marketing "Built in Delphi!" examples.
I was all-in.
It seems I learnt HTML just between these two eras. After the , 1px spacers and tables, and before the piles of abstractions.
People cared about doing well formed XHTML and having those W3C Valid XHTML badges, and also those "install Firefox" buttons.
This was short so today everything looks ugly to me, old and new, in different ways.
I still use (polyglot) XHTML5 (HTML5 if I don't control everything being input) and avoid frontend frameworks and web fonts when I get to decide. This is a world where implementing a search bar for people who haven't discovered CTRL+F yet takes 30 lines of dumb Javascript and filters 200 items in 1 second on a slow computer without any caching trick and that does not require minifiers and bundlers. Which does not actually sound impressive, or shouldn't anyway. A world where when you disable Javascript, the page is still perfectly readable. A world where a silly mistake in the HTML markup is noticed.
To build an actual web application where it does not makes much sense to have the content as a web page, I started liking Svelte but I'll still at least consider doing things by manipulating the DOM directly before deciding.
And of course one of the biggest issues with today's web: you can't just view source and copy paste. You're in the land of chasing back up CSS files, js libraries, or finding yourself unable to steal an image because it's not just an image you can right click on any more.
Golden times.
My highschool computer curriculum was basically a hacker school program for web dev stretched across three years (senior year we did VB6). I managed to be impressive because I would dissect web pages to learn their tricks. I think I must be the only one (or if not, at least among the first) in our level to pull off columned layout without CSS. I figured out <table border="0"></table> all by myself, neither the books nor the teachers taught you that. And I did that by reading source code on IE5---developer tools weren't a thing then!
In our second year, one of the exercises was to recreate Yahoo's log-in page. I got closest exactly because of the above. I still feel smug remembering this.
Golden times, indeed. :)
So, the computer class instructor sat me down and asked me what I knew about programming. "I can use Perl", I said (I had read Perl For Dummies, v5.00502 edition). So he told me to make an online calendar for the school. So, I did. No instruction... just figured it out as I went. And that's how I learned that managing and displaying events in arbitrary times and dates is harder than P=NP.
Turns out that giving me that project was intended to save the school from having to pay for a real online calendar.
So long as your browser window was the same resolution as the designers.
There's browser extensions that will convert a whole page as it is loaded in the browser to an image file. For ever-scrolling pages you have to manually stop it.
Dead Comment
Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>.
I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.
I remember seeing "DHTML" still being thrown around as late as 2005, but knowing that I could refer to the components of a webpage as "DHTML" never seemed to have any sort of utility. I never cared that I could refer to the markup as being dynamic. Big deal. What scripts and applets could I add to make things move?
Of course now we're still stuck with this "HTML5" canard that won't die because nontechnical people seem to believe it's more advanced than "HTML".
It was definitely "Dynamic HTML". Just a few weeks ago, I threw out a bunch of old issues of MacWorld... one of them had a cover article on the then-new technology of DHTML.
Then you do the ol' "View Source" and now that technique is in your toolkit. In fact you'd prob head right over to your geocities site and try it out right away.
I really think the web community lost something with the transition to compiled uglified js and css…. Sure google will show you to some code if you manage to put what you are looking for into words but that isn’t always easy. Pitty that there is no standardised solution to publish the source along with the Minimized script nowadays.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/So...
Can’t tell if you’re sarcastic or not, assuming not all comment readers will be aware either way.
For JS it's a different story of course but it was never that easy to begin with since the code that affects an element can be anywhere.
<html> <script src="obfuscated.javscript-pack.chunk-12384123.chunkittychunk-packweb.der.huhwhat?{this?:this-v3.2123-notcompatiblewithv3.2122}.js"> <div id="modern-web-app-goez-here"></div> </html>
Good luck with that!
I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes).
Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms!
Edit: wow cgi proxy has been updated as recently at 2019! [1]
0: https://web.archive.org/web/19980709151514/http://scriptarch...
1: https://jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "<surname>'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.
Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game, right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded UltimateBB.
... and if you search "wwwboard" apparently you can still find some in the wild.
It got me poached by a media company who was all-in on the dotcom boom hype and convinced we'd all be billionaires within a year. They paid me stupid amounts of money (for a dropout skater who refused to wear a button up shirt to work) and I cranked out crappy HTML templates for them to sell to people who had "an idea and some money", investing their life savings in the "next big thing". Always felt dirty working there, so I wasn't upset when they went bust and ended up owing millions to creditors and losing everything they had.
That all led to a 20 year career in web stuff for F500s and Government as I self-taught my way through web design, to graphic design, to front end dev, to back end dev, then to netsec. To this day I never finished school or got any qualifications, new jobs would come to me via old jobs. Something I think would be impossible in IT today.
I left tech about 10 years ago now and mostly work on old cars and be a dad, reading HN to see how much things have changed and for the nostalgia trips like this. It's insane seeing how different things are when it wasn't "that" long ago. I can't think of any other industry that can be so unrecognisable within such a short timeframe.
I don't know how this trend came to be. I fought it for as long as I could, links are underlined and when you hovered them the underline would go away to make it extra clear this is an interactive element. I considered it a staple of good design. Why did we remove the underline?
Traditional print designers started doing web design without investing the time to understand the important differences in the (new) paradigm.
Sadly, that root problem too often persists to today.
Or pick a 90's trope: Ironic detachment? Only things that are obscure are cool?