hckrnws

It's funny how eternal the IE6/7/8 struggle felt at the time and now it's essentially ancient history. All that knowledge of how to coax CSS into doing things cross-browser circa 2004-2010 is basically useless to me now. Those years were my HS hobby -> college -> career transition period and it's amazing that I didn't give up because of how god damn convoluted basic frontend development was back then. And it was so discouraging because you could do things by the book (er, spec) and they'd work flawlessly in Firefox, but look assbackwards in IE6.

I love/hate that era so much.

I agree with this feeling 100%.

It's hard to describe I think. It was a mess, but a mess in a smaller/less convuloted place? Much less frameworks, options, etc.

I love that era so much. Web development back in the 90/00s was fun.

It was, until it really, really wasn’t.

Sure, I miss the magical cowboy days, when it was entirely normal to write a ream of spaghetti that did something incredible, but I really, really don’t miss the “our customers are complaining that the site looks bad on IE4 at 640x480 in 16 colours and the purple gorilla has to go why did you add it” calls.

Oh, and IE for Mac. Back then one kept a bottle of scotch and a pistol in one’s desk.

Not to worry, we'll eventually have a similar experience moving from Chrome to whatever comes next. Their market share is in the IE6 digits now, and Pepperidge farm remembers how advanced and sophisticated IE6 was considered when it launched.

IE6 was 95%+ at its peak, Chrome is barely at 60%+ if you take iOS Safari into account.

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.MotionBlur(strength=100) my beloved

A lot of us felt like such pioneers in those days. Writing frontend web apps was an emerging and rapidly changing art. Those of us on the bleeding edge read Ajaxian.com and Douglas Crockford. I was writing internal SPA apps for Firefox+IE6 with Prototype.js and ExtJS.

My co-workers strongly disagreed with my approach -- to build for Firefox first, then hack it to work on IE. "Why bother when 95% of your users are on IE? That's a waste of time."

But those apps are still being used, almost 2 decades later, with no modifications required (besides a couple of weird edge case hacks for later versions of IE).

Always bet on the web.

I remember DHTML before the word Ajax was coined. It is somewhat sad we didn't push this forward to its absolute limit. Instead 20 years later we have very different set of Front End tech.

And XLST... Actually pretty cool, a standardized way to render XML files. Too bad XML was way too verbose and clunky that everyone basically walked away from it.

I built an entire window manager and trading platform around XSLT, streaming prices and trades using XHR. It never saw the light of day, thankfully.

Thankfully? It didn't work well or you weren't satisfied with the technology? Rendering too slow?

I had a flat file blog hobby project that would take ATOM documents and run them through XSLT to render the whole website, all on client side.

The furthest DHTML got was "here's a cool JavaScript you can add to your page to make it do this". I used to download these from DynamicDrive.com. It took Crockford and Ajax to birth front-end development as we know it today (albeit without modules, CSS 2, or ES5+).

It didn't help that so many JavaScript books of the time treated the language like a toy.

I’m biased, but the web is the best platform.

Web is definitely better than mobile (Android/iOS) apps, as apps are hard to develop and hard to debug.

my favorite ie css hack was

\IEversion

e.g.

width: 100%\9;

would only apply width: 100% to IE9.

it showed that even microsoft devs hated how css became a pissing match and needed a system to workaround their own mess.

i do not miss css hacks to support ie, but this approach to hacking ie was the best out of the lot

A lifetime of dirty browser hacks is suddenly flooding back. Kids these days will never appreciate what we had to go through to make a page render anywhere near consistently in different browsers.

Tricks like crafting css that only some browsers could parse.

    height/**/: 300px;

https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/

The mystery script we included to get alpha support in images.

https://git.twinhelix.com/cgit/iepngfix/tree/iepngfix.htc

The fact that select inputs were rendered by the OS so you had to find them all and hide them when you opened a modal so they didn’t sit on top of your content.

The desire to support custom files that drive us into swapping all the text for blocks of Flash after the page loaded.

It was almost better than the 20 level deep nested table layouts full of shims we had to do.

The most memorable hack was the voice-family hack for IE 5.5 IIRC. I remember reading about it and how the hack was so nice as to reset the voice-family afterwards. To date I still don't think voice-family is really supported anywhere; really shows how optimistic CSS was at that time.

You didn’t have to hide selects, you just (just, hah!) had to dynamically generate an empty iframe and shim it one z-level below your absolutely positioned div.

And the second browsers supported rounded corners, they went out of style :-(

Exactly!

There is a whole taxonomy of hacks. Syntax hacks (star hack), CSS hacks (clearfix), quirks mode doctypes.

A few years before that, we had single pixel GIF transparent spacers to manage table cells in layout, and more atrocious hacks.

This was a dark age.

We had a production outage one day because we had accumulated more than four thousand CSS selectors and IE8 could not handle that many.

We accidentally discovered the max number of assets circa 2011 in a very large Rails app in development mode (which loaded CSS/JS files individually without concatenation). I forgot what it was but it was much lower than you'd anticipate.

4,096 iirc, and i also was one to arbitrarily split files lol

I think I got hit by that being not exactly 4096. Some elements would grab a selector handle, then disappear, but take the handle with them. It's been too long, and my memory is too crap, to be sure. But I think I sat there growling cursewords for a few days until I worked that one out.

I... don't think this \9 is intentional! If I remember correctly, any attribute value would mess up IE < 9.

At this time, I was favoring using conditional comments to deliver tweaked simplified CSSs for the IEs. They were not only buggy, they were slow, so for a while it made some sense.

There were two things, \0 (escaped null) and \9 (which I think was could be any other escape sequence, but that 9 was customarily used). I don't remember the difference in browsers they'd target, the information will still be out there somewhere, I'm sure, though you'll have to sift through dead links.

15 years ago, I write a sing about this called "IE is being mean to me": https://youtu.be/vTTzwJsHpU8?si=JYWTMBjJKunrhitR

Just seeing the date on the article as 19 years ago rather than 2005 hit a little harder than I expected

So true

Here's an archive.org link for the IE7 script link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240110054654/http://dean.edwar...

> IE7.js is a JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.

Adding to the pile of anecdotes of dirty browser hacks we're proud of: In 2002 (few years before Ajax went big) I rolled my own Ajax-y thing using a hidden iframe with a form inside it to send & receive data from the server while the user never saw a page reload. The app I used it on was for a client whose rather bad idea failed a year or so later but I'm proud of my part of it as a junior dev with a crazy idea!

[flagged]

good riddance