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 <input type=image> 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.
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.
xnx · 1h ago
All content on the web should have a unique, linkable, URL. Frameset breaks that.
theandrewbailey · 24m ago
That doesn't stop today's dynamically updating pages that break the back button.
rdrd · 31m 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!
jameslk · 2h 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
skerit · 1h 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 · 3h 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.
chrismorgan · 3h ago
Plenty of modems/routers still use frames in their management interfaces.
reconnecting · 2h ago
I explained the concept of frames to a developer born after the millennium, and their reaction was that it is a pure magic.
iforgotpassword · 4h 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 <script> that would reload the frame on the right, containing the user list. Fun times. Used it with a couple class mates around 2000 iirc.
vanviegen · 3h ago
I managed to get real-time chat (and other real-time colab) working on IE4+ using long polling, by continuously adding <script> 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 · 3h ago
Sounds fancy! My solution back then was infinitely auto-updating a frame with a meta refresh tag. It would receive a new <script> block that would update the contents of other frames. This of course wouldn't give real-time functionality.
perilunar · 4h 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/
b800h · 1h ago
I was expecting you to tell me that all of these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
FeteCommuniste · 20m ago
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."
zambal · 1h 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 :)
jeffreygoesto · 1h ago
I remember cgi.pm and the magic of communicating two ways.
lanyard-textile · 1h ago
I remember when display flex was still new, experimental, and not universally supported :)
atemerev · 3h ago
Spacer gifs, OMG, the memories! <table> 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.
42droids · 3h ago
Started in 1998 with front page.
xnx · 1h ago
Fancy! Not even Front Page Express first?
FranOntanaya · 58m ago
Don't remind me, Front Page Express' generated HTML was the stuff of nightmares.
xnx · 55m ago
Still better than Microsoft Word.
brazzy · 48m ago
My personal website uses an image map for its main navigation menu. It still works just fine.
ceautery · 28m ago
You're in good company, Paul Graham's site does as well.
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. :)
deadbabe · 4h ago
3000 years ago, when Ancient Egyptians argued over how they should format Papyrus text.
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.
ajdude · 2h 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: https://udel.edu/~ianozi/
TapamN · 4h ago
My favorite trick with <marquee> 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?
adamcik · 2h ago
A friend of mine would always put `<blink>` 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 :-)
timpark · 3h 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!
bornfreddy · 2h ago
Yeah, but if someone had used <blonk> you would get... blonking I guess? :) Nice hack!
AndrewStephens · 3h ago
This comment is under construction - check back here often to see updates!
johannes1234321 · 2h ago
Where are your visit counter and guestbook?
brazzy · 43m ago
Right under the web ring.
InsideOutSanta · 1h 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."
precommunicator · 1h ago
When doing HTML sanitization, I always whitelist marquee as an easter egg (and almost nothing else)
ChrisMarshallNY · 1h ago
I was a blackbelt 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.
"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 · 3h ago
I don't know, I still use Firefox as my primary browser.
psychoslave · 2h 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.
shawn_w · 3h ago
I don't know how people can use anything else, especially now that Chrome doesn't support ad blockers.
flomo · 3h ago
Root for the illegal Google monopoly then, because that's what Mozilla says they need to survive. (It's over soon.)
bornfreddy · 2h 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 · 1h 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?
cubefox · 1h 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.
yakattak · 6h ago
I know it’s horrible design but I love using <marquee> to test things in HTML sometimes.
90s_dev · 5h 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 · 5h ago
“Username checks out” - Reddit
Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.
latchkey · 6h ago
Do you remember when there was a brief bug in Netscape that enabled multiple <title> tags to effectively animate the window title? That was a fun one.
HnUser12 · 2h ago
Lot of older India gov sites still seem to use these tags.
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.
burnt-resistor · 3h ago
Ah yes, the <BLINK><MARQUEE><H1> 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]
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.
geoffmunn · 2h ago
also Guestbooks and the email icon of the word 'email' rotating around a globe.
ryanthedev · 3h ago
This was a perfect piece of nostalgia. I love that blink was created as a joke.
satiric · 6h 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?
It’s used all over the place on Indian government websites, old and new. Often by <marquee>, sometimes by JS, maybe sometimes by CSS.
I never figured out why the actual <marquee> 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.
bradly · 5h 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.
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.
90s_dev · 6h ago
Yeah, to really emphasize an important message.
divbzero · 5h ago
Interestingly, the default <marquee> doesn’t appear as smooth as a CSS animation would be?
Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother:
<marquee scrolldelay="50" truespeed>scroll faster than default</marquee>
flowerbard · 5h ago
They weren’t smooth back then by default either.
4gotunameagain · 4h 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.
Theodores · 1h 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 <blink> or <marquee>. 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 <blink> and <marquee> 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.
bryanrasmussen · 6h ago
needs <xmp>, no pre is not a replacement.
jameslk · 2h ago
They took away the <blink> 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.
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.
k1t · 4h 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.
xnx · 57m 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.
DoctorOW · 2h 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.
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 <input type=image> 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. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
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
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.
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.
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/
What is the motion jpeg hack? I made my own streaming too before websocket... but I never heard of this.
https://paulgraham.com/index.html
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. :)
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."
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] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation
> from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10 (about:mozilla)
And now Mozilla is being scorched to the earth. The End.
And not just to be another neocities.
There's so much lost joy and wonder to recover.
Sincerely, just do what you love with it, don’t market it.
https://www.epfindia.gov.in/site_en/index.php
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.
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_tearing
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
https://homestarrunner.com/toons/under-construction
I never figured out why the actual <marquee> 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.
[0]: https://bradlyfeeley.com/ (no idea which browsers it renders properly in)
Playing with the scroll speed makes it feel smoother:
No 20mb js framework, no ide, no ai "assistants", just pure, healthy, free range basement grown webpages the way god intended.
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 <blink> or <marquee>. 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 <blink> and <marquee> 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.
However, thanks to the brilliant hard work of the open source community, we have a widely supported browser polyfill: https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250608044216/https://danq.me/2...