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?
Let’s just design every website using a table again. Or even better, frames!
I stand by that iframes had their place, even if the backend devs absolutely hated them.
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.
Are iframes really sandboxed in different processes than the main frame? On which browsers?
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
sandboxattribute have a number of additional restrictions, which can be individually disabled when needed.
Running each app component in it’s own iframe is perfectly valid microservices architecture change my mind.
I believe Kingdom of Loathing used iframes extensively to achieve what looked like a “dynamic” page long before that was a thing.
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.
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
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.
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.
? 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.
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
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!
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.
