CSS Curiosities of the Past

rrobin_reala about 5 hours ago 18 commentsRead Article on vale.rocks

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VCFundedGenYer•13 minutes ago

I last heavily worked with CSS in 2010/2011. These still don't feel old to me.

There came a point where if you wrote good HTML/CSS that passed the W3C validator, you were golden on pretty much any device. This still rings true today.

sbarre•about 1 hour ago

Surprised there was no mention of the old system theme colours (that I think still work in some browsers but are long-deprecated):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...

I used these CSS styles in the late 90s to make internal browser-based apps for our call centre agents that looked & felt more like native Windows desktop apps.

robin_reala•38 minutes ago

They’re still there for use in forced colors mode. I blogged about this a bit at https://medium.com/flat-pack-tech/ikea-windows-high-contrast...

gaigalas•19 minutes ago

They exist but don't actually grab system colors (to prevent pages spoofing the system look).

---

Shameless plug:

In neutrino (my webview wrapper), we grab those and inject them as prefixed CSS variables (--neutrino-NameOfSystemColor).

Works on windows/macos/gtk/qt, and except for qt it works live (if the user changes the accent tone, the CSS variable updates automatically).

https://alganet.dev/neutrino/ Screenshot of Mint: https://imgur.com/a/WyjpwsR

Cyykratahk•about 1 hour ago

The really funky part of the IE6 PNG fix was that the URL of the image in the expression was always relative to the current page URL, not the CSS file that the declaration was in.

I remember having to use Javascript to generate the image path (I cannot quite remember why absolute or root-relative URLs were not an option for us though...)

meerita•about 2 hours ago

I was having a peaceful day until these CSS curiosities brought back memories of my painful days. It's really good that we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore. The last time I participated in a project that targeted an old browser was in 2018!

nottorp•about 2 hours ago

> we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore

Unfortunately that means everyone targets chrome.

Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox [1].

You'd think with "AI" they could generate js/css that works in both browsers...

[1] Which is the only browser that can still run proper ublock origin...

Edit: someone pointed below that the compatibility problem's magnitude is much smaller. Seems flagged and dead for unknown reasons.

The magnitude is probably much smaller, but that makes it worse, because people will just forget about FF.

bryanrasmussen•31 minutes ago

The magnitude might be greater in specific sub areas, for example if you are doing chrome first, how is your accessibility on Safari? I don't know myself, but I think there are holes people don't notice with this approach.

Also I agree the thing about Meerita's post being flagged and dead seems wrong. There is evidently nothing wrong with the post and it should not be.

carlosjobim•18 minutes ago

It's easy nowadays to make websites that function perfectly and look beautiful on all devices, browsers, and systems from 10 years ago until today. If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.

nottorp•13 minutes ago

> If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.

... i haven't been able to download my invoices off the Orange Romania site for months in Firefox. They work perfectly in Chrome.

Somehow I bet the ones that fucked up the functionality got a raise instead of being fired.

robin_reala•about 2 hours ago

Out of interest, how do you define “old”?

meerita•about 2 hours ago

Mostly Internet Explorer 7 and 8, some Mozilla Firefox builds. That’s what I had in mind when I said “old browsers.” The last project I worked on that still had to support browsers from that era was in 2018.

robin_reala•about 1 hour ago

Sounds about right. Looking back I’d already moved IE7 to “functional” support in late 2016[1] and was planning to do the same to 8 and 9 in the not too distant future.

[1] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/10/21/gaining-understand...

ryanschaefer•about 2 hours ago

If anything is worthy of the title “load-bearing” it’s IE…

I wonder how many collective years of developers’ lifespans were dedicated just to addressing its quirks.

VCFundedGenYer•11 minutes ago

When I took web design courses they basically told us you effectively have to make two websites - one for IE6, and one for all the other browsers. It came down to a bunch of crazy hacks and conditionals you had to bake in.

Sharlin•less than a minute ago

I remember when we were allowed to bump the minimum supported IE version of our SPA framework from 6 to 8. It was a joyful day – but we soon realized that it didn’t really buy us that much because 8 was almost as quirky…

mike_tyson•about 1 hour ago

it was frustrating but i preferred it to dealing with stuff like node, tooling, mobile and tablet views, that stuff really burned me out in a way that IE 6 never did.

gaigalas•23 minutes ago

Missing the whole IE quirks mode vs standards mode thing, but nice.

Some of those hacks were specifically for IE, and there was a debate on staying quirks vs going standards mode. Each had its own drawbacks and choices.

mike_tyson•about 1 hour ago

miss those days.

i was seen as a genius at work for understanding quirks mode and how JScript differed from javascript/ecmascript

vladde•about 2 hours ago

funny how almost all of these are just related to Internet Explorer haha