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Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
yyyk wrote 3 hours 7 min ago:
90s web:
Blink was used almost entirely for annoyance value - in other worse,
all its uses were annoying. Marquee was the slow news ticker at the
side you could ignore if you wanted to.
zzo38computer wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
I think is even worse than (even if you do not use CSS).
globalise83 wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
Controversial take: marquee is still useful, and I still use it!
acidburnNSA wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
Ahh, good times. I ran a "college dorm floor" website off my computer
for a while and included a 997-word marquee on it, just rambling and
talking about girls, depression, and philosophy. At the very end there
was an exclamation point that was a href to a hidden page. Of course,
someone hit view source to read the stupidly long message and found the
page anyway.
atum47 wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
You can put a marquee inside a marquee and make the DVD bouncing logo.
Did that on my first day of college, inside an .hta file for windows
and blew my classmates minds. #hackerman
mcswell wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
I've wondered whether the marquee idea could be behind the UFOs/ UAPs
that appear to move extremely fast. Specifically, you line up a bunch
of drones that can communicate with each other via directional (or just
weak) radio or laser transmissions. Then when a drone on one end of
the line receives a radar pulse from an aircraft (etc.), it sends back
a stronger pulse than its reflection would be, and simultaneously
signals the next drone in line. That drone sends off a radar pulse and
signals the next drone in line, etc.
The effect, as viewed from the aircraft with the radar, would be a
somewhat larger (or more reflective) target moving rapidly.
The line of drones would not need to be straight, in which case it
could simulate a fast-moving object that suddenly turns.
skeeter2020 wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
without the marquee tag how were we supposed to build the scrolling LCD
screens that dominated our physical electronics?
shortrounddev2 wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
A coworker of mine unironically added a marquee tag to an internal tool
we were working on. Not as a joke, he just googled how to add scrolling
text and copy pasted it, without knowing the history behind it
jabo wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
The day I discovered that marquee tags have a direction attribute,
using which you can make the text go up/down left/right and use
multiple of these tags, is still etched in my memory.
dmatech wrote 17 hours 2 min ago:
The amusing thing is that even today, there's a "blink" method on
JavaScript strings. It's totally useless today, but it's still there
for whatever reason. In fact, they don't even HTML escape the
argument, so they were arguably terrible from the beginning.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refere...
arp242 wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
Removing it will cause old code to throw an exception. By making it a
no-op the code will remain working. There's tons of old unmaintained
stuff on the web.
K0IN wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
in the German Mozilla docs there's was a warning: "this tag is one of
the worst things you can do to your users, please don't use this" which
they sadly removed.
here is the German version:
[1]: https://x.com/K0IN1/status/1025459517499367425
Theodores wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
One reason people hate these elements is that they were overused.
However, with that over use, people were giving HTML a go. For someone
new to writing HTML, it was very rewarding to be able to use or .
These were the gateway drugs of the HTML world, and, anyone that used
these elements would eventually learn not to, or maybe not, if it was
their mySpace page.
It is easy to hate on the and elements, much like how every snobbish
graphic designer can chortle about stupid people using Comic Sans,
however, all of these no-no's had great utility in giving people
confidence to give things a go.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
I was a Master Navigator of the Meat Mysterious[0].
My magnum opus was a Flash site, that looked like a blank black page,
and revealed the page structure, in a fuzzed circle, as you moused
around. It was, literally, a flashlight in a dark room interface.
You could probably do the same, these days, with CSS. Back then, you
needed Flash.
The space must flow…
[0]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
InsideOutSanta wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
I find marquee extremely useful, for one reason: HTML injection.
I find it helpful to test for HTML injection vulnerabilities because
marquee moves, and it's a tag that (almost) nobody intentionally uses,
making it easy to identify when an attack works.
I also find it helpful to show non-technical people the effects of HTML
injection, because, again, it moves. "This moves and it really
shouldn't move" is something people understand better than "this text
is bold and it really shouldn't be bold."
rda2 wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
I browse Hacker News through a custom aggregator. This post is how I
found out it’s susceptible to HTML injection - a (2020) was
marqueeing across my screen.
Sophira wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
This whole comment section must be absolutely hell to look at on
that...
precommunicator wrote 19 hours 41 min ago:
When doing HTML sanitization, I always whitelist marquee as an easter
egg (and almost nothing else)
jameslk wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
They took away the tag from us, due to what can only be explained as
the high costs to maintain such a complex feature in modern browsers,
and late stage capitalism.
However, thanks to the brilliant hard work of the open source
community, we have a widely supported browser polyfill:
[1]: https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill
HnUser12 wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
Lot of older India gov sites still seem to use these tags.
[1]: https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php
GranPC wrote 15 hours 59 min ago:
Holy crap, that's a website alright
chgs wrote 19 hours 52 min ago:
I just applied for an evisa for India. It was horrendous. Pages
wouldn’t continue without telling you what was wrong (too many or
not enough commas in the address/phone field was one). When returning
to the form the pre filled data had quotes in, which then wasn’t
valid. Missing labels on fields. Then the hilarious “what countries
in the last ten years, list all or get deported” combined with
“you have too many countries”. They only allow 20.
I don’t know if it’s the state of development in the country as a
whole or just the lowest bidder for a government service problem.
smj-edison wrote 5 hours 55 min ago:
Man, I'm glad that in general form inputs have gotten a lot better.
I was reading The Design Of Everyday Things the other day, and it
was mentioning how most websites required an exact formatting and
didn't provide an explanation...
al_borland wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
This was to prepare you for navigating once there. I still have
flashbacks to the Delhi Airport. Every time I turned a corner there
was someone there asking to see the name on my itinerary (a random
sheet of paper I printed out hat I didn't think I'd actually need)
with my passport and ticket. It happened so many times I almost
missed my layover.
HnUser12 wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
All of that is true.
However, to be fair, these are older sites. The newer ones are
generally cleaner and usable[1]. Even the services provided is
much more streamlined.
[1]: https://web.umang.gov.in/landing/
ajdude wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
I created this a while ago, and whenever I show someone they are
shocked to see there is absolutely no JavaScript; all of the animations
are done via marquee tags:
[1]: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/
al_borland wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
I probably haven't looked at the marquee tag in 20 years, so I could
have just forgotten, but I was unaware it has a direction parameter
to allow for vertical scrolling.
adamcik wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
A friend of mine would always put `` around his middle name as a quick
and dirty way to test for missing escaping and possible xss. Back in
the day this was surprisingly effective at uncovering problems :-)
ryanthedev wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as
a joke.
AndrewStephens wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see
updates!
skeeter2020 wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
For which browser is this page optimized?
layer8 wrote 15 hours 42 min ago:
Don't forget the [NEW]
johannes1234321 wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
Where are your visit counter and guestbook?
brazzy wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
Right under the web ring.
burnt-resistor wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
Ah yes, the to tell everyone the website made in notepad in 1997 was
still under construction in bold, Comic Sans, and fuchsia on a yellow
background. Don't forget the lots of NBSPs so that the message scrolls
off for even a longer period of time and the reader has to wait for
their computer to shift the message back into the viewport.
What's missing about the retro experience is browsers and computers
were slower back that then, so large marquees would blink and scroll
with visible tearing.[0]
0.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
geoffbp wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
Image of a construction worker digging
geoffmunn wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
also Guestbooks and the email icon of the word 'email' rotating
around a globe.
burnt-resistor wrote 21 hours 18 min ago:
Yes. And it should be animated as the background image so you can't
read any of the normal text in 6 px font without highlighting it.
timpark wrote 22 hours 0 min ago:
The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as an
experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using
(Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to "blonk".
Tada, no more blinking!
username223 wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
Binary editing was/is good fun. I remember replacing "__gnu_warning"
with "__gnu_whining" to quiet some dumb nannying around gets(). Yeah,
sure, buffer overruns, but if I'm writing some throwaway program, I
can just not overrun the buffer.
Waterluvian wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
I do this kind of thing with the Slack client (a silver lining of
Electron apps: it’s dead simple) so that I can kill features I
don’t like, such as hiding notifications or stopping the signal
that I’m writing a message.
bornfreddy wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
Yeah, but if someone had used you would get... blonking I guess? :)
Nice hack!
timpark wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
Exactly, haha! :) Thanks!
4gotunameagain wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
The good old days of writing html on the windows 98 notepad.
No 20mb js framework, no ide, no ai "assistants", just pure, healthy,
free range basement grown webpages the way god intended.
flomo wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of
vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall
be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of
days."
> from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla)
And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.
atemerev wrote 21 hours 53 min ago:
I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
psychoslave wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
Same here, but this is in spite is the governance of the foundation
looking so out of rails and simultaneously lake of better
alternative I'm aware of with both better governance and fine
enough technological state.
flomo wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
Root for the illegal Google monopoly then, because that's what
Mozilla says they need to survive. (It's over soon.)
bornfreddy wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
I assume you were being sarcastic? I see it the other way around
- the sooner Mozilla gets off the drugs^WGoogle's money the
better the chance we get a proper competitor to Chrome.
ripdog wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
Um, so, how are Mozilla supposed to get the hundreds of
millions of dollars a year it costs to pay engineers to
maintain an evergreen browser without Google's funding?
bornfreddy wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
How did they survive without their funding before they got
it? And don't say that web standards are much more complex
nowadays - yes, they are, because it is in Google's interest
to make them such. Will it hurt? Yes. Will Firefox survive? I
hope so. Is it a bad idea? No.
joshuaissac wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
> How did they survive without their funding before they
got it?
They were initially Netscape, a commercial company, so they
had money from their customers.
After the browser code base was handed over from
Netscape/AOL to the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, they got
donations from AOL, IBM, Red Hat, etc. which kept them
going for a few more years.
The Mozilla Foundation signed the deal with Google two
years later, in 2005.
In short, they survived first on commercial revenues and
then from donations, neither of which are substantial now.
flomo wrote 48 min ago:
Informative. AOL also sued Microsoft for iirc $1 billion
for their illegal Netscape shenanigans. That kept Mozilla
going for several years when they really didn't have a
product, and probably would have been shut down
otherwise.
cubefox wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
The opposite will happen as they lose most of their funding.
They will have to fire most developers and switch to chromium,
to become yet another Chrome reskin. Congratulations, you
killed Firefox.
shawn_w wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now that
Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
bonoboTP wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
Currently you can still reactivate the ad blocker extensions,
it's a bit hidden behind a three dot menu and you have to confirm
a scary warning but it's still possible to run u lock origin at
the moment. They might disable the workaround later though.
trallnag wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
It still supports stripped down as blockers. For the casual user
something like ublock lite is probably perfectly fine
skeeter2020 wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
if you switch between chrome and FF (say work/home) the
difference are glarring though...
TapamN wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
My favorite trick with was to nest them, with different, alternating
directions. You could make the contents alternate between scrolling and
stopping by setting the inner marquee to travel in the opposite
direction at the same speed as the outer marquee. Or do more levels
with alternating speeds to make it zip around randomly. I think you had
to set a max width for the inner marquees for this to work?
donatj wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
I was there, 3,000 years ago.
I remember fights over whether or not navigation in frames was bad
practice. Not iframes, frames. Who here remembers frames?
I remember using HTTP 204 before AJAX to send messages to the server
without reloading the page.
I remember building... image maps[1]... professionally in the early
2000. I remember spending multiple days drawing the borders of States
on a map of the country in Dreamweaver so we could have a clickable
map.
I remember Dreamweaver templates and people updating things wrong and
losing their changes on a template update and no way to get it back
because no one used version control.
I remember and handling where you clicked on an image in the backend.
I remember streaming updates to pages via motion jpeg. Still works in
Chrome, less reliably in Firefox.
I remember the multiple steps we took towards a proper IE PNG fix just
to get alpha blending... before we got the ActiveX one that worked
somewhat reliably... Just for tastes to change and everything to become
flat and us to not really need it anymore.
I remember building site navigations in Java, Flash, and Silverlight.
I remember spacer gifs and conditional comments and what a godsend
Firebug was.
I don't know when I got old, it just happened one day.
1.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/El...
twhb wrote 22 min ago:
> spacer gifs
Hacker News actually still uses these for comment indentation, check
this page’s source code.
neoberg wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
I remember building fluid views with rounded corners before
border-radius.
cardamomo wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark near
the Tannhäuser Gates. All those moments will be lost in time, like
and .
crabique wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
I remember WML tag, essentially SPA 20 years before SPA even became
a term.
connorgurney wrote 15 hours 49 min ago:
Oh, man, this takes me right back. Scary how time gets away from you.
rdrd wrote 18 hours 35 min ago:
I remember working for a client who needed to support IE6 (with all
the insane bugs/quirks/limitations) and I’d despair every time the
designers would hand over a Photoshop design with rounded corners.
They also needed it to be responsive (at the time mostly just
different desktop sizes). Would usually require cutting the corners
out and positioning them in table cells. There’s a certain amount
of dev resilience you build having to do stuff like that by hand!
mrweasel wrote 13 hours 21 min ago:
We worked with an internal design team, but basically just one UX
specialist who has zero comprehension of how HTML, CSS or and web
related technologies worked. At one point we where meet with "I
don't like that the site blinks!" ... What do you mean by "blinks",
we built it, it doesn't blink. Turns out she didn't like that that
switching pages would cause the browser to load the next page and
in turn there would be an ever so brief moment where the browser
would show a blank page while loading the next page. This was in
the initial ASP.NET and Ajax days, to the end result was "wrap the
whole damn thing in an update panel".
For those who doesn't know the ASP.NET update panel was basically
HTMX before HTMX. The browser would do a background request and
replace the content of the update panel with the html returned by
the background request. Normally you'd just use if for a form
submit, e.g. like a comment box. The user puts in their comment,
the backend return all the comments, including the new one and the
browser replace the current list of comments with the new one. We
essentially put the entire site in to the update panel.
SoftTalker wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
Or just telling the designers "we can't do rounded corners for this
client" (the client likely didn't care at all).
davidmurdoch wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
For some reason I actually really loved doing this. I remembering
feeling disappointed when css got border radius.
layer8 wrote 15 hours 52 min ago:
At least table rows didn't unexpectedly wrap to a new line like
float-based layouts.
rdrd wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
Even though it was a long time ago I still have IE6/7 workarounds
burned into my brain, most of them float related but also having
a whole stylesheet for that damn browser... :
[1]: https://code.google.com/archive/p/universal-ie6-css/
emfrosztovis wrote 7 hours 52 min ago:
I’m only 20 but when I immediately recognized this I felt so
old.
brazzy wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
My personal website uses an image map for its main navigation menu.
It still works just fine.
ceautery wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
You're in good company, Paul Graham's site does as well.
[1]: https://paulgraham.com/index.html
Timwi wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
I developed web software with frames and I thought it was perfectly
fine. To this day I still don't understand the issue with frames.
People sometimes mention accessibility for screen readers, but
nothing more specific than that, so I still don't know what the
actual problem is.
sedatk wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
> so I still don't know what the actual problem is.
1. Not adaptable to the variety of display form factors we have
today. In other words, not responsive enough.
2. As others mentioned, not being able to link a specific page.
Maybe it can be overcome with modern browser history replacement
API's nowadays.
3. A link to one of the frames not opening with necessary
navigation elements. That used to be solved by redirecting the user
to another page that would decorate the same page with the frames
around it. Quite cumbersome.
4. Since all frame components are individual web pages, the
communication between them isn't straightforward except for opening
a link in another frame. Programming more complicated logic (such
as dragging from one to another, or sharing components in other
ways) would be quite difficult.
5. Every frame has its own scrollbar. It's less accessible, and
looks terrible too.
6. Analytics is harder to track.
ok123456 wrote 10 hours 44 min ago:
It generally got a bad reputation because it was abused to keep
people on portal-like and aggregator sites. These sites would
parasitically add navigation banners and ads(!) to content they
didn't own. You had to be somewhat web-savvy to know how to escape
an annoying frame.
They also wouldn't fly these days because of CSP and general web
security.
When Google Image Search first launched, it surprised people
because they found a legitimate use for frames that wasn't
user-hostile.
MyPasswordSucks wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
> I still don't understand the issue with frames.
I paid for 1024x768. Because of your frames, the content I'm
actually interested in is now restricted to some disgusting and
dismaying fraction of that. The borders of my bitchin' 15" CRT are
now committed to navigation (which I have to scroll horizontally to
actually make sense of) and what is likely a LinkExchange banner on
the bottom that adds absolutely nothing to my experience.
echelon wrote 15 hours 21 min ago:
We should have frozen the web from 2006 - 2010 or so.
We had Ajax, lots of modern CSS, but weren't hell-bent on CSSifying
and "SPA"-ing everything. Web standards hadn't yet jumped the
shark.
It's also before Steve Jobs murdered Flash.
Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made. The
modern HTML/CSS/JS stack can't replicate how simple and functional
it was. We're easily dealing with 100x the complexity now.
We let Google trick us into going down this path. And now they're
going to kill the web to keep us on their LLMs and platforms.
Mr_Minderbinder wrote 3 hours 42 min ago:
> Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made.
Flash was a proprietary extension to the Web. That important
parts of the Web were implemented with it was a travesty and
reason enough for it to be killed as it threatened and subverted
the open nature of the Web. The useful functionality it provided
has been incorporated into Web standards and current
implementations are no more complex or less efficient than Flash
was. The rest is fluff which can readily dispensed with, there is
no need to re-implement it, although lately I have been wondering
if it is possible to replicate its functionality with a
combination of SMIL and SVG.
GuB-42 wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
Adobe killed Flash by letting it die. It had plenty of issues,
none of them unfixable. Adobe didn't fix these issues (security,
accessibility,...) all while keeping everything proprietary. It
was unsustainable and unfortunately, Flash had to go.
cardanome wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
Oh man, the good old times when you could get a job just knowing
a bit of HTML, CSS and JS. I so wish I could go back.
Now I am micromanaging a LLM that gets to do the fun parts. I
have become the middle management I always hated.
okanat wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
Flash was a bigger privacy hole than HTML5 canvas. I think we
need to mandate browsers that block those APIs on default and
only enable them via permission. is often used in
fingerprinting. So blocking its introspection APIs would already
benefit us.
redwall_hp wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
Flash was basically a remote shell with some animation tools on
top. The Windows malware hell of the early 2000s, with random
websites (even a banner ad on the New York Times once) doing
drive-by-installs of early ransomware. (Thankfully,
cryptolocker ones hadn't started yet...) And if you were a
Windows escapee, the Flash experience was absolute trash on OS
X and Linux.
It also became clear that the source code was borderline
unmaintainable and/or Adobe lost everyone who knew or cared
about it after they bought Macromedia.
echelon wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
That sounds like a big deal until you realize that nothing was
private back then.
Most internet traffic wasn't even over SSL. It wasn't enforced
until 2018!
No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site protection
(first standardized in 2012).
Everything was the Wild West.
Flash was fine and could have adopted the same mechanisms.
If Adobe (or the earlier owners) had open sourced the player
and the format standard, they could have won and had the best
authoring tool for the format.
To this day, Flash is the only downloadable binary bundle
format that can still run on your PC after being downloaded.
You can't download and SVG animation. It's a bundle of brittle
web tech slop.
JimDabell wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
> No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site
protection (first standardized in 2012).
This is not correct. CORS doesn’t protect anything, it
removes security barriers. The same-origin policy that stops
cross-site requests goes back to the 90s, it’s been in
there about as long as JavaScript.
shortrounddev2 wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
I agree. Personally I think we'd be better off without social
media sites or smart phones
mcswell wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
Punch cards. We need to go back to punch cards.
cebert wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
Why would we want to do that? The data density is quite low.
atesti wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
If you right click a link and open in new window (or middle click),
the frameset was gone and only the piece in the frame was visible.
Also you could not bookmark anything. I remember doing a frameset
per content frame url automatically and also redirecting to that
frameset from inside the page via javascript if the content frame's
url was directly opened.
AlienRobot wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
If browsers got around to actually implementing basic features on
browser level like making a frame navigation work instead of
coming up with new CSS properties that nobody is going to use we
could be all building websites without any javascript.
torgoguys wrote 15 hours 13 min ago:
Framesets were great.
>If you right click a link and open in new window (or middle
click), the frameset was gone and only the piece in the frame was
visible.
Feature, not bug in my book. Same thing happens in today's
iframes. But for situations where that is a problem, the spec
could have been extended to support every page being able to
identify a preferred parent frame. Or browsers could have changed
behavior to by default duplicate a frame's parent and siblings
when opening a frame in a new window.
>Also you could not bookmark anything.
Again a limitation of the spec that could have been addressed
rather than throwing out a useful feature. We support have text
fragment identifiers in URLs these days; surely we could have
supported URLs with multipart frame targets.
xnx wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
All content on the web should have a unique, linkable, URL.
Frameset breaks that.
ComplexSystems wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
That ship has long since sailed. We live in a world of web apps
with dynamically created content, AJAX, and so on. The main entry
point for the app has a URL, and then within the app all bets are
off. Same with framesets.
xnx wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
SPAs were a low point, but I've found consistent and linkable
URLs has gotten better with developers recognizing the
importance due to "SEO".
catlifeonmars wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
Also crawlers can now evaluate SPAs. Googles crawlers will
run JavaScript on the page making the SPA SEO issue much less
of an issue now.
Idk if that counts as a low point or a high point.
no_wizard wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
There se excretes to this, particularly if you value speedy
vs delayed updates to your indexing
theandrewbailey wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
That doesn't stop today's dynamically updating pages that also
break the back button.
roryirvine wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
Frames also broke the back button when they were first
introduced!
Together with the other early problems - ugly borders,
proliferation of scrollbars, and limited browser compatibility
- it meant that frames were seen as a usability disaster right
from the start.
They never managed to fully shake that reputation even as
browsers improved in the later 90s.
zambal wrote 19 hours 33 min ago:
Don't know if it was intentional, but your ramble reminded me of the
lyrics of Losing my edge by LCD Soundsystem. However, as someone who
also experienced most of this stuff, it was a fun read either way :)
lanyard-textile wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
I remember when display flex was still new, experimental, and not
universally supported :)
b800h wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
I was expecting you to tell me that all of these moments will be lost
in time, like tears in the rain.
mcswell wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
b800h, meet jameslk (see post a few lines above yours)
FeteCommuniste wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."
jeffreygoesto wrote 19 hours 53 min ago:
I remember cgi.pm and the magic of communicating two ways.
reconnecting wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
2.
andrelaszlo wrote 20 hours 20 min ago:
I remember a website about Ski-Doo snowmobiles that my friend was
obsessed about (both the website and snowmobiles) in 1998 or so. It
was from Canada, and the bgsound was the website owner saying
something in French.
To us, it sounded like: fjänfny, hmmhmmhmm, dadadada. I only
realized lately that the first word must be "bienvenue". It would
be amazing to find it again on archive.org but unfortunately I dont
remember more than this. :)
jameslk wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
I remember meticulously using the photoshop slice tool
To export gifs meant to be positioned perfectly in HTML tables
For designs suited best for 800x600
All those moments lost in time, like tears in the rain
HappMacDonald wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
I remember meticulously perfecting every trick that the slice tool
eventually automated before it existed using Jasc Paintshop Pro:
squeezing every kb for maximal presentation from pieces of a larger
image into gifs or jpgs so that the parts of it which needed to
animate or be interactive could do so and the large parts that
didn't could remain as high quality as possible.
And then I remember the slice tool appearing one day and being
equal parts annoyed that they were biting my style and amazed that
they did as thorough and well considered of a job as they did.
codingdave wrote 14 hours 1 min ago:
That is what Fireworks was great for:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks
skerit wrote 19 hours 30 min ago:
> I remember meticulously using the photoshop slice tool
I made so many newsletters using that tool back in 2009.
I remember a new designer was appalled I used it, and did not write
the HTML code manually... 70% of our receivers were using Outlook
and the horrible Word-based HTML renderer. I'm not writing anything
manual for that piece of crap.
shawn_w wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
>Who here remembers frames?
I visit a site with frames several times a week. Nobody's ever told
the Open Group/POSIX people they're not supposed to use them these
days.
reconnecting wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
I explained the concept of frames to a developer born after the
millennium, and their reaction was that it is a pure magic.
chrismorgan wrote 21 hours 16 min ago:
Plenty of modems/routers still use frames in their management
interfaces.
42droids wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
Started in 1998 with front page.
xnx wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
Fancy! Not even Front Page Express first?
FranOntanaya wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
Don't remind me, Front Page Express' generated HTML was the stuff
of nightmares.
xnx wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
Still better than Microsoft Word.
atemerev wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
Spacer gifs, OMG, the memories! should be enough for everyone.
What is the motion jpeg hack? I made my own streaming too before
websocket... but I never heard of this.
perilunar wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
Been there, have done (most of) this. Never used Silverlight, but did
use VRML, Java Applets, and Chromeffects.
I remember writing image maps by hand, getting the point coordinates
directly from the image in Photoshop.
Re version control: learned very early on to make a backup of a
website before making any changes. Our version control was
/site/yyyymmdd/
iforgotpassword wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
I made a webchat with frames; an infinitely-loading top part for the
text, and the bottom an input box that received 204 to not reload
when you sent a message. I guess that was the most elegant way to do
it in the IE4+ days.
The top part could also receive a small that would reload the frame
on the right, containing the user list. Fun times. Used it with a
couple class mates around 2000 iirc.
Sophira wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
A webchat that I used to go to back in the day implemented this
too. I used to spend a lot of time there - it was my Internet home
for several years. I miss it terribly.
troupo wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
It's still a way (with a frame autorefresh) to make chats on Tor,
since many users will have JS turned off
vanviegen wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
I managed to get real-time chat (and other real-time colab) working
on IE4+ using long polling, by continuously adding tags from
JavaScript. The server would delay answering until there were new
messages available, or some timeout. This was even before
xmlhttprequest. Who needs websocket? :-)
distances wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
Sounds fancy! My solution back then was infinitely auto-updating
a frame with a meta refresh tag. It would receive a new block
that would update the contents of other frames. This of course
wouldn't give real-time functionality.
pixl97 wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
Fun, until you had dial up so slow the refresh happened again
before anything on the page fully loaded (mostly an issue with
images)
deadbabe wrote 22 hours 39 min ago:
3000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians argued over how they should
format Papyrus text.
SvenL wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
I think this is a reference to a LotR meme.
[1]: https://youtu.be/Q63_FxegFsQ?feature=shared
bornfreddy wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
For those who prefer not to visit yt, the quote "I was there,
Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago" refers to Elrond
talking about the time when Isildur took the One Ring from
Sauron.
divbzero wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Interestingly, the default doesn’t appear as smooth as a CSS
animation would be?
Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother:
scroll faster than default
layer8 wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
I’m pretty sure that originally it was to reduce CPU load, and
later was left that way for backwards compatibility.
esprehn wrote 16 hours 2 min ago:
In Chromium it's quite literally a CSS animation: [1] All the code in
that file is a fun read. was rewritten as if it was a web component
using the public DOM APIs (ex. It uses CSS animations and
requestAnimationFrame).
[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:thi...
flowerbard wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
They weren’t smooth back then by default either.
ksymph wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
HN hug of death?
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/202...
neonate wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20201111125145/https://danq.me/202...
moralestapia wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
Never got the hate to these.
I think some people just want to feel important by diminishing things
they see others diminishing, makes up from not having thoughts of one's
own.
This applies to everything, not just HTML obv.
xnx wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
As others have said: scrolling text is harder to read than
non-scrolling text. Scrolling text is useful in the real world when
space is limited. On the web, there is no space limit, so almost no
reason for scrolling text.
moralestapia wrote 10 hours 4 min ago:
???
What do you mean by "on the web, there is no space limit"?
If you're talking about the interface by which we consume the
content, I use a screen whose dimensions are finite. What do you
use?
DoctorOW wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
It's really simple, moving text is hard to read. As an example, turn
on the local news (bear with me, I work for a TV station). You'll
notice the scrolling ticker is likely simplified to focus on one
headline at a time, with more pauses in between.
moralestapia wrote 10 hours 5 min ago:
So, it's bad on web but good on TV?
DoctorOW wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
The opposite. It's been phased out of TV, (more pauses, less
scrolling text) around the same timeframe that it phased out on
the web. I threw together a visual comparison:
[1]: https://gifrun.azureedge.net/video/4e99ff8b27414bbb93c3c...
moralestapia wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Wow. Great comparison, thanks!
k1t wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
People generally hate things that try to steal their attention away
from the thing they are trying to focus on.
It doesn't matter if it's a scrolling marquee, an animated gif, some
Flash, a movie, a popup, a cookie banner, etc...
Generally, moving/animated things grab your attention and people find
it annoying.
90s_dev wrote 1 day ago:
I really need to repurpose 90s.dev asap.
And not just to be another neocities.
There's so much lost joy and wonder to recover.
dgfitz wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
“Username checks out” - Reddit
Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
needs , no pre is not a replacement.
yakattak wrote 1 day ago:
I know it’s horrible design but I love using to test things in HTML
sometimes.
satiric wrote 1 day ago:
Considering the marquee tag works in basically all browsers [1], has
anyone here actually found a good, unironic use for it in today's world
of crazy CSS animations?
[1]
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/El...
sparkie wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
They can be useful in a tabbed interface. Since the width of a tab is
limited, and may not be large enough to fit in the text, scrolling
the text in the active tab title may be better than hovering to show
a tooltip (Though we should use the tooltip for the inactive tabs).
senfiaj wrote 15 hours 59 min ago:
Perhaps better semantics?
chrismorgan wrote 21 hours 8 min ago:
It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and
new. Often by , sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS.
I never figured out why the actual tag has a low frame rate. Maybe
it’s to make it more unpleasant so you won’t want to use it.
Certainly I would use a CSS animation instead for the frame rate
reason, if I was forced to put a marquee on a page.
mbo wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
I use it to display RSS feeds on my personal website ( [1] ) as a
allusion to news tickers (which are themselves an allusion to ticker
tape machines: [2] )
[1]: https://maxbo.me
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape
bradly wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
I use a bunch of marquees to create an animated scene on my
homepage[0]. Different speeds for a parallax effect and even some
multi-axis marquees for rain effect.
[0]: [1] (no idea which browsers it renders properly in)
[1]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/
satiric wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
I love the use of emoji in that animated scene! I would never have
guessed; I only found out from looking at the raw HTML.
edoceo wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
Trees and clouds! (Pixel + Chrome)
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
Plex does something very similar to marquee to display an actors name
when it's too long to fit under their profile pic. Seems like a good
use.
layer8 wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
Music players, including car radios and portable CD and MiniDisc
players, did that around 25 years ago. It's sort-of a standard UI
pattern for variable-length text in a fixed-size display.
seanhunter wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
The correct use is alongside the “man with a spade”.jpg to let
people know your page is under construction.
bitwize wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
"Hey! Stickly Man! WHAAAAAAAAAAAT are you doing!"
[1]: https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction
90s_dev wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, to really emphasize an important message.
latchkey wrote 1 day ago:
Do you remember when there was a brief bug in Netscape that enabled
multiple tags to effectively animate the window title? That was a fun
one.
9rx wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
In a similar vein, the little animated messages in the status bar was
peak internet.
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