Old CSS, New CSS - <AUTHOR> https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/ <comment><USER3> Wow, that took me back.

Small nitpick, XHTML does live on in one important place: epub, which is the most commonly used file type for ebooks.

I do a lot of epub work at Standard Ebooks, and at first I hated XHTML for the exact reason the article describes: A single tiny error makes the entire document invalid and it can be hard to spot it and recover. Also, namespaces were (and still are) a massive pain for little to no gain.

But over time I've come to really appreciate XHTML, again for that exact same reason. It forces you to write correct XML, and there is no possible ambiguity or multiple ways of representing a tag like there is in HTML5. `<br/>` will always be `<br/>`, not maybe `<br>` or `<br/>` or even `<br></br>`. An XHTML document from someone else will be both human-readable (after pretty-printing) and easily machine parseable. You also get xpath, which is a way of selecting elements akin to CSS but even more powerful.

Ultimately XHMTL is better suited to epub's use case, which is static documents that are written once and not dynamically generated by templating languages or libraries. Too bad there was some talk of epub switching to HTML5, though it's unlikely future revisions of epub will ever see wide adoption.

<comment><USER4> > Ultimately XHMTL is better suited to epub's use case, which is static > documents that are written once and not dynamically generated by templating > languages or libraries.

That's backwards. Relying on software to assign random meaning to broken input is never a good solution to anything, neither for static documents nor for dynamically generated documents. It's just that HTML allows you to get away with it, kindof (i.e., no scary error messages, just subtle breakage everywhere), which is why people built templating systems that didn't bother with correctness either. If the web had been XHTML from the beginning, templating systems would have been built in a way that makes it hard to generate broken documents in the first place, because the error messages would have created the incentive to do so, thus avoiding a lot of the subtle breakage as well.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. Nobody is complaining that JavaScript terminate parsing on syntax errors. Because it has been like that from the beginning.

The problem is introducing stricter rules which breaks existing content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like I learn a lot more about CSS from articles like these as opposed to books because it puts CSS features into context with the problems they were meant to solve. The historical context helps a lot, too. The way that I've tried to learn CSS in the past was essentially a random collection of tricks.

Are there any more articles like this? I'd read them all day.

<comment><USER7> My uncle likes to call it "fictional nonfiction," saying that the human brain is better at following stories than piles of facts.

<comment><USER8> At St. John's College (back in the 90's anyways), we called this "teaching science and math historically" (as opposed to teaching the history of science and math -- which tends to emphasize dates and names).

By telling the story of science and math, we gained the context of who did what for what reasons. Which unlocked my understanding of science and math in a way that textbooks never did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> CSS today is so good that I now design websites in CSS and just present a website to the client.

If you use grids and flex you can rearrange content very quick if the customer wants to move it.

My workflow is now much faster. Great for the client, great for me.

The only design tool I use in the beginning is a pen and peace of paper to get some ideas of where I want to go. But after that it's all HTML + CSS.

<comment><USER10> >CSS today is so good that I now design websites in CSS

There are so many things missing that people are forced to use Javascript and a div-mess to implement widgets. Ex elements like dropdowns, numeric input, the small scrollbar that appears for elements, I am wondering if browser makes are just ignoring css and focusing on JS.(I admit flexbox and grid layout is cool)

<comment><USER11> Why do you want to style dropdowns or scrollbars? Using those "designer" dropdowns is a pain on mobile, while simple dropdowns just use native controls and work flawlessly. Same about scrollbars, I hate websites that interfere with my scrolling.

<comment><USER10> Is not me, the designers want it, we need to ask them why? But in my case it was a complex application that is not intended to be used from a phone.

<comment><USER12> > Is not me, the designers want it, we need to ask them why?

Yes: JS widgets have a usability impact and especially accessibility, which is a legal requirement in much of the world. Some libraries have good accessibility stories but given that this is an ongoing cost which will need to be supported it's always important to link it to an actual requirement (e.g. searchable drop downs) to justify the expense.

<comment><USER13> There is ARIA, but ARIA isn't quite good enough. I also suggested a <widget> element, which allows you to define your own widgets and provide an implementation in HTML and JavaScript to be used if the browser cannot use it directly (if the widget is implemented directly (subject to user configuration), then the stuff inside the <widget> block is ignored or used in an implementation-defined way; if the widget is not implemented, then the <widget> is treated the same as a <span>, and any <script>, <noscript>, etc it contains is interpreted normally). (For selections from lists, there is already <input> anyways, and the browser can include whatever special features they want; they may be disabled in application mode if needed.)

<comment><USER12> ARIA is always improving but really the problem is that most developers either don't use it or don't test their usage. This is not a problem of needing new technology as much as companies skimping until they get sued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, this brings me back. I started working on the web a couple years after Eevee did. I remember all of the pain points he did. (One note: when I was learning in 2001-2002, most of the tutorials and books still used <FONT>, <CENTER>, <BIG>, etc., even though CSS was around. I remember using CSS was extremely painful because of IE5, which was the default on my Win98 machine, so I didn't bother really trying till hearing about Firefox - I mean Phoenix.)

I also remember that centering any block element within another block element with CSS was somewhat absurd. The trick was to do something like

.centered { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

And of course, there was no way to vertically center an element within another without hacks and HTML detritus that served no semantic purpose. It was almost worse than the table-based layouts.

That's the only other painful thing I vividly remember behind what Eevee posted.

Flexbox and Grid have made things a lot better, but I still run into weird inconsistencies and exceptions frequently. (The latest involved trying to set `max-height` on a `resize: vertical` element, and I couldn't get it to work without hacks or JavaScript. Chrome implements resizing by overriding the width or height on an element's style attribute.)

Wonderful post! Would love to see more.

<comment><USER15> That's still how I do horizontal centering, FWIW. I guess I have some catching up to do.

<comment><USER16> Take a look at FlexBox - if you've been around the CSS layout block a few times you might find yourself going "finally - they figured it out!"

<comment><USER17> Flex has indeed figured it out, I use it for everything now and rarely touch margin: auto unless I'm being lazy or there's a very simple usecase.

But that said Flex still very much classic CSS: the awkward naming schemes, the excessive options for each parameter, the mixing of different options available, etc... it's still very much CSS in all it's quirky dirtiness.

CSS Grids kind of shocked me that they weren't entirely convoluted.

Maybe it's the design-by-committee stuff but even as CSS has gotten better: it still took way too long and it's still very weird. Maybe like JS this will slowly no longer become true, but I'm kind of happy I grew up without Flex/modern CSS because I'm unafraid of that quirkiness.

<comment><USER16> JustifyContents and AlignItems are like inserting an old USB key: I always get it backwards the first time and have to switch it over.

<comment><USER18> On that note, did you know there's also justify-items and align-content?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Retro HTML was great! You never had to figure out why your CSS inexplicably wasn't working, nobody complained when things didn't look beautiful, because beautiful was impossible. Bring it back!

LOL, I particularly love the breakdown of Space Jam. Oddly enough, I very briefly considered breaking out an old-school imagemap, like, a month ago. I was trying to get one of those lightbox-style image galleries to work, including a clickable area on the side of each image to get to the next one, and I couldn't figure out how to do all the weird border-padding-whatever-else unholy CSS witchcraft to get the clickable areas aligned correctly with the images. Imagemaps may actually work better than the hacked-together solution I eventually came up with...

<comment><USER20> I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I still write HTML the same way I did in the 90's.

i.e. In notepad using <table> to control the layout.

I never learnt CSS at some-point I should learn it but I work with html so infrequently I never bothered. My "notepad html" is more than enough for anything I've had to do in last two decades.

edit. One thing I do miss is being able to hit view source in browser and understand everything, nowadays all javascript.

<comment><USER21> God, I'm in the same boat. I don't do web programming, so my web design skills stagnated around the end of the Space Jam Era documented here. I don't work with CSS often enough to memorize its inconsistencies (why is text colored with "color" but backgrounds are colored with "background-color"?), so it's mostly a baffling series of frustrated googling whenever I'm unlucky enough to work with it.

I'm glad you all like it, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > (Native buttons also went out of vogue, for some reason.)

Ah, I still remember native buttons being _introduced_. Good times, back when browsers could introduce features that seem so obvious in retrospect - such as spell check in text boxes. Feels like all the low-hanging fruit has been picked by now. (Or is it? Firefox's integrating a password manager feels pretty similar.)

Great overview, though. I feel like my history with the web has been almost the same as the author's, and this brought back a lot of good and not-so-good memories.

<comment><USER11> Browsers still lose my 15 minutes of typing when something goes bad and I'm returning back to page. I understand that it's usually caused by websites forbidding caching, so browsers have to reload page, but they still could save that data somewhere and present me an option to restore it, at least for some time. Something like auto-complete.

<comment><USER23> For this reason I attempt to develop a habit to type every comment or post in vim first. This loss of typed text happens maybe once in 2-3 months but it's extremely annoying.

<comment><USER24> Exactly! Sometimes I wonder why browsers have no hook for launching external editor for textbox input, like EDITOR env in shell? This could also solve the need for RichTextbox with JS based controls for bold/italic/bullets etc.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I would want to have more user commands for many things such as:

\- External editor for textbox input

\- Save form data to a local disk file

\- Recall form data from a disk file (on the same or a different webpage than it was saved from)

\- Replace scripts in the document

\- Document/application mode switch

\- Disable rich text editing

\- Specify a remote filename when uploading files using forms

<comment><USER22> > \- Replace scripts in the document

You might be interested in [https://decentraleyes.org/](https://decentraleyes.org/)

<comment><USER13> That would be good for replacing jQuery and so on, but I would want to be able to replace inline scripts too sometimes. (And also some sites have their own copy of jQuery; I will still want to substitute my own if their own copy is otherwise unmodified.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last document styling language anyone would ever need.

Unfortunately following an incident with a broken Lisp machine, a liquid lunch, and an unlicensed particle accelerator, I became trapped in a parallel universe where the HTML ERB anointed CSS by mistake during a drunken night out in Oslo.

The fundamental concept of CSS (best revealed by H.W.Lie's thesis IMO[1]) was to create a rich and versatile and non-Turing-complete set of structural selectors in lieu of DSSSL's recursive logic, and to allow styles to overlay one another; two design choices that only by the application of gallons of irony can explain why most web pages are composed of a bunch of nested DIV elements with hashed IDs and overloaded semantic class attributes, and everyone compiles their assets into a static file.

I switched to Tailwind CSS months ago. Adam Wathan is the hero we deserve.

[1] [https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf](https://www.wiumlie.no/2006/phd/css.pdf)

<comment><USER26> Can you elaborate on what problem tailwind is solving? My first impression is that it looks like a set of custom built css classes.

<comment><USER25> No, not custom at all. Quite the opposite - it's a well-curated set of standard classes. It's the focus on utility-based composition of style that sets Tailwind apart. For me the problem being solved is maintainability, recognising that CSS is tremendously brittle with regard to the application it serves and the context in which it is evaluated.

Probably best to read [https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and- separation-of-...](https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation- of-concerns/) which does a much better job of explaining the motivations, and the conceptual journey of its creator, than I ever could.

Many folks (not all, but many, I'd even venture to say ... most) have a four step reaction to Tailwind:

1\. That is the stupidest webdev idea I ever heard, and I've heard a lot. // 2\. Fine, I'm trying it because everyone else keeps prompting me to and/or its creator seems competent. // 3\. This is weird but actually quite helpful and totally not what I expected. // 4\. You have ruined me for any other CSS framework and I never want to use anything else.

All CSS is crap. Tailwind is (in my experience and opinion) the least crap and most productive approach yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Damn, I miss those days. There were no big walled gardens, no Twitter or Facebook. If you had anything to say to anyone, you had to put together your own website. It was amazing._

I also created websites back in the day with spacer gifs and framesets, but I don't understand this qoute.

People still create their own website. There are still a lot of forums with a wide range of topics.

For example: not so long ago I was into reef tanks. There are a ton of forums and websites about that subject. Maybe even more than in the old days.

<comment><USER27> _People still create their own website._

Far fewer than back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I think the reason for that is because people didn't actually want to make websites - they wanted to have a voice on the internet and making a website was pretty much the only way to do that. Now if you want to publish your ideas about reef tanks you could learn to write HTML and CSS and make a website, or you could write on Twitter, or you could make YouTube videos, or you could do a podcast, etc, etc.

There are fewer people making websites but there are more people publishing _something_ on the web.

I think when the web industry's old guard lament the fact that no one really builds homepages any more it's genuine and heartfelt because they (and I include myself in this) really enjoyed looking at what people made. For me to see what interesting and exciting ideas people have that they can do with HTML and CSS is much harder now. There's Glitch and Codepen and stuff, but I feel like I'm still missing loads of the best stuff.

<comment><USER28> And it was great. It was a barrier of entry for speech. You could do it, it was free, but you had to apply some effort, you had to have _something_ to say.

Now the Web is flooded with morons on Twitter who's opinion is just the noise you have to filter through.

<comment><USER29> Don't over romanticize it. There were a lot of experiments, goofiness, and bad information in those days, too. It was also nearly impossible to find anything.

<comment><USER30> There was a beautiful period before Google was reverse bought by DoubleClick where you could find damn near anything. Searching was a solved problem by Inktomi and AltaVista but PageRank solved _sorting_ search results (for a while).

Before Google AltaVista's search was pretty good at filtering out the meta tag spam that bubbled up in other search engines.

<comment><USER31> > beautiful period before Google was reverse bought by DoubleClick

That's a beautiful way to put it. I remember those days and thing is, much of Google's reputation was built during those days, a coattail they're still coasting on today.

In those days I remember you could find anything at all in just a moment. "Information snacking" was a thing, versus "being given the answer we think you want (or the one that will make us the most money)".

"Reverse bought by DoubleClick", will have to remember that..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wow, I wish I'd had this article a few years ago.

Back in the 90s I wrote my high school's first website. We even got a scan of a picture of the school done in way too high resolution. It was a massive pain to get running, given my buddy and I were in our mid teens and the web was moving fast. Everything was a bunch of different hand crafted pages of tags, served from a machine sitting in the school. But basically we figured out how to do it by reading one or two pages about it.

I left school and eventually did a lot of financial coding, which was mainly backend stuff plus a small amount of desktop GUIs, or very very basic web pages.

Not until a few years ago did I have another look at the web, and it had of course changed enormously. It seems nowadays everything is a tool that compiles into something else. There's a zillion frameworks in js, there's webassembly, there's a bunch of things that you use to build the CSS. The page itself seems to be a load of divs, many tags from the old days are archaic now, only seen on old university sites. Sites themselves are served from a datacenter, and not from one machine. Static content doesn't even need to come from the same place. Security and privacy is a thing. There's no one place to learn the whole thing, which I suppose is expected.

<comment><USER11> You still can write static HTML/CSS and host it on your machine (if you have accessible IP) or some cheap VPN. It'll work just fine. It's possible to write a very complex websites nowadays with those technologies. But not every website have to be complex.

<comment><USER33> Yeah but you don't get eyeballs with that anymore unless you have something really unique.

When the web was new you could get a lot of hits with static content. It is not so easy to do that now.

<comment><USER34> How many hits is a lot?

Not a lot of people had computers with Internet back then. So sure, you can't captivate the same percentage of the entire World Wide Web - but why would you expect that to be a reasonable assumption?

Sure, in a world where the web was a couple million nerds you'd expect your content to be a bit more visible.

But the web is measured in billions of users now.

I would also suggest that writing content just to ensure that people read it is looking at it the wrong way. That's a shallow popularity contest. If the production of that content doesn't bring you satisfaction on its own then it doesn't matter whether you have 1 view or a million, it's not making you happy.

<comment><USER33> Humans seek social interaction, whether that's in person or online, or by doing good or bad things to get attention. I would not call that a popularity contest because it happens with everything. A popularity contest would be one extreme end of a range of behavior.

If you are producing content for yourself and it makes you happy then you don't need to put it in public view. The whole point of the internet is to interact, share your work and see others' work.

<comment><USER35> Indeed in web 2.0 content is not a concern, the point is number of likes.

<comment><USER33> That is the point I was refuting. In the current web, communication is still the overarching motivator. Content still matters, and the usability of your site is a factor in communicability. So, if someone's site is easier to navigate and more frequently updated due to the use of updated technology, that may be a factor when people decide where to spend their time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wild. I remember every single one of those milestones.

Back in 04 I wrote some forum software with XmlHttpRequest back before gmail was released. The everybody thought I was a fucking wizard. Then gmail came out and it was like oh you did that gmail thing. Good times.

But yeah, the long slow death of IE 6, crazy stuff. God, it feels like it's been a decade since I've had to seriously think about cross browser bugs, versus that eating up half my development time. Evert time I curse mobile Safari these days I remind myself of IE 6 and calm down pretty quick ;)

</comment><comment> mr-ron If you want to go back further, the best article on how the web and styling worked circa 1993 is this [http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr- style/](http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/)

And alternate articles

[http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/](http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/)

[http://contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular- web-2/](http://contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/)

</comment><comment><USER37> With CSS-Grid now you can do practically most of the things without using dozens of CSS properties. I barely use Flex, even. But it's late for current CSS techniques, because I'm abduced to functional CSS ([http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian- methodology/](http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/)) and I don't want to look back anymore ([http://minid.net/2019/08/12/in- defense-of-functional-css/](http://minid.net/2019/08/12/in-defense-of- functional-css/)).

</comment><comment><USER38> I've been away from front-end web development for a while now. I've been doing steadily less of it over the years, and by now it's probably been 4 years since I've touched it at all. As memory serves, the last project was gulp, typescript, SASS, and still jQuery.

When the front-end work began to fork off into it's own real separate independent discipline, likely when we really achieved separation of the UI from the backend, things started to change and I ended up having to make a choice. With front-end build tools, CSS processing libraries, larger frameworks like React/Angular, I ended up on the back-end side of the equation - data platforms, databases, web services, application logic, integrations, infrastructure, etc.

Seeing this reminded me of how much fun front-end development was, even with having to deal with the annoying quirks of HTML, CSS, JS and all the browsers.

Did anybody else, like me, suddenly have a real hankering to sit down and break out all the new HTML/CSS/JS toys and start playing? :)

<comment><USER18> > Did anybody else, like me, suddenly have a real hankering to sit down and > break out all the new HTML/CSS/JS toys and start playing? :)

Happened to me last year, with the steadily-increasing annoyance at how complicated it's gotten at work - just to see how easy/difficult it would be to put together that blog I'd been thinking about for years, without using a single frontend framework.

(That blog isn't live, it got put aside for other projects in case anyone was wondering. But yeah, particularly with grid-template-area, it's not difficult at all anymore to do whatever layout you want. Even got some limited component-y goodness with inclusion templates and direct-descendant selectors.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I still maintain that the only (not the "best", but the only) way to really learn something - even something technical - is to understand its history and understand how it got to be the way it is. Everything starts out about as simple as you expect it would be - probably the way you or I or anybody else would put it together if we didn't have any guidelines to work off of, and ends up being refined a bit at a time as more surprises are discovered. The problem is, what you end up with - like modern CSS - just don't make a lot of sense unless you understand what problems the current versions were refined to work around.

</comment><comment><USER40> I loved reading this. My first job was mainly spent fixing IE box model problems (remember when Microsoft could only ship Trident updates as part of huge Windows updates?!). I now have an allergic reaction to any cross-site compatibility problems, because -- in a rare exception to the rule -- it genuinely WAS harder in my day, and we managed it.

<comment><USER41> > remember when Microsoft could only ship Trident updates as part of huge > Windows updates?!

They had the ability to parallel install all along, eliminating the need for updates as part of huge Windows updates: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495979)

<comment><USER42> The link inside the link says that clicking on the favorites menu would cause the browser to crash. Not exactly ship-able.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Half the Web was fan portals about Animorphs, with inexplicable splash pages > warning you that their site worked best if you had a 640×480 screen.

This is an amazing reference. K. A. Applegate's post-series Animorphs site, _hirac delest_ , is still online - and was originally written around this era (series ended in 2001, so its last update, if not creation, is a bit later). It has some newer stuff like CSS, but definitely check out the source here as well: [http://www.hiracdelest.com/database/index_database.htm](http://www.hiracdelest.com/database/index_database.htm)

Just with a quick scan on the main page, it has a mix of upper and lowercase tags, a "best views in" resolution, various font tags, and body tag similar to the SpaceJam one:

      <body text="#CCCCCC" link="#33CCFF" vlink="#33CCFF" onload="MM_preloadImages('../images/menu-v2/over_thumb/about.jpg')">

( _hirac delest_ is from the period when I first started learning html/css/js, within a year or two)

<comment><USER43> MM_preload...

That's Dreamweaver I think, steaming pile of crap its pages were.

Edit: actually, it was a very good IDE for writing html at the time I used it; it's wysiwyg led people to make pages that were a terrible mess under the covers though.

<comment><USER44> > MM_preload...

Yep, just trigger some trauma for me there. Had long since buried that.

>That's Dreamweaver I think, steaming pile of crap its pages were.

... seriously, this post brought up things I had long intentionally forgotten. I was one of those poor fools that fella for the WYSIWYGness of DreamWeaver

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> When the browser wars ended 15 years ago, not much have happened. The innovation has instead moved to userland, which achieve things with crazy hacks and meta/trans-compilation. We have committees writing new "standards" faster then anyone can implement them. But there is no natural selection. What browser engine are you going to switch to if you are unhappy with your current one? That said, most of the hard problems have already been solved, so writing vanilla html/css has been a breeze ever since things settled. And its also very stable.

<comment><USER46> Let's not forget Firefox and Gecko still exist, though.

<comment><USER45> Yes, but it seems like Firefox is only keeping up, they are playing defensive, while they really ought to attack weakness in Chromium or give users a reason to switch. Right now Chrome is slightly more efficient, slightly better feature coverage, etc.' One reason why I still use Mobile Opera is because it automatically adjust the text when I zoom in... A bold move for Mozilla would be to cut down expenses to a 3 year buffer, cut their funding from Google and force themselves to become independent.

<comment><USER47> Reason to switch?

Trust.

Mozilla cf Google.

<comment><USER45> 95% of Mozilla money comes from Google. Last time I checked Firefox still sends everything you type into the address field to Google. So if you do not trust Google, how can you trust Mozilla!?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I would like to add Bootstrap to the list, including other CSS libraries/frameworks.

In Bootstrap case, it included a grid, and other UI components (like a dropdown menu, and a modal dialog), but most importantly, it took care that the page worked the same in all major browsers of the time.

It helped me to prototype various projects over the years.

</comment><comment><USER49> A friend of mine new to CSS was rebuilding the Google homepage using Flexbox. He asked me why Google uses <center> in their HTML, to which I told him it's most likely due to compatibility. Google is accessed by every web capable device and browser ever made. Yet, seeing <center> feels unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER50> The grid version, praised as the best version, on [https://eev.ee/media/2020-02-css/thumbnail- grids.html#grid](https://eev.ee/media/2020-02-css/thumbnail-grids.html#grid) renders incorrectly in chrome 79, the current stable release. (It looks fine on Canary and in Safari.) The more things change...

<comment><USER51> For me, the grid version is broken, I open dev tools and it fixes itself, I close dev tools and it remains fixed, I _refresh the page_ and it remains fixed, I close and reopen the tab and it remains fixed, I close the tab and open it again from the link and it's broken again.

Just plain haunted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think the most important step was Firebug: the first good browser dev toolbar.

[http://positioniseverything.net/explorer.html](http://positioniseverything.net/explorer.html) saved me hours of debug multiple times when IE6 was the main browser around.

</comment><comment><USER53> What a great article. It manages to simultaneously understand and debunk the nostalgia for the old web. I find it a little frustrating to hear people complain about how complicated the web has become and how simple things were back in the day. I mean, sure, there is a lot more complexity in certain areas, but that's because we've become significantly more ambitious and because we've pushed formerly pervasive complexity to the edges (and thus concentrated it to an extent). I'm so glad we don't have to resort to such hacks to get _rounded corners_.

One could argue that the old-school equivalent of NPM dependency hell was all the little snippets one had to copy and paste to get somewhat portable, somewhat usable sites. Except those dependencies were managed in an entirely ad hoc fashion, without any versioning or attribution.

And as the last section demonstrates, you can now write front end code that is so simple and yet flexible, maintainable and (mostly) portable.

I'll admit, I'm a pretty adamant CSS in JS supporter, but I still do use CSS at the end of the day. This post demonstrates that I still have a lot to learn about proper CSS, but more importantly, there's a gigantic amount that I no longer have to learn. Which is a testament to the progress made.

</comment><comment><USER54> "unless for some reason you use an iPhone, which forbids other browser engines, which is far worse than anything Microsoft ever did, but we just kinda accept it for some reason." \- yes...what is that reason? How is it even possible?

<comment><USER55> For a simply objective look at the different positions of MS than and Apple now, there are three significant points that spring to my mind:

1\. Apple do not have anything like the monopoly stronghold on the phone & tablet market that MS had on desktop and laptop PCs.

2\. They are not (that I know of) directly using the market power that they do have to try completely block competitors. While there is no doubt some coercion going on (if you give iDevices pride of place in your store we may give you preference over others when supplies are low) there isn't the outright "stock Android and we won't give you any iDevices to sell" equivalent to MS's behaviour with regard to DRDOS/BeOS/OS2/... in the 90s.

3\. They are not being deceptive about their position, like MS quietly but very deliberately scuppering DRDOS during Win3.1 development ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code)). Apple-land is officially a walled garden where MS were at least pretending to operate openly in a shared market.

More _subjectively_ , whether these objective differences are enough to justify the relevant authorities not going after Apple is a matter of opinion and/or complex legal wrangling concerning the interpretation of monopoly/anti- competition/other legislation and its wording.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Are we not supposed to use server-side includes anymore? I never stopped. I find them quite useful, and they use virtually no resources on the server.

</comment><comment><USER57> I miss those days. In theory we're supposed to separate presentation from content, but I've never seen anything non-trivial that doesn't have a lot of nested inexplicable divs to workaround some confusing behavior. Nested tables were an ugly hack, but it was at least clear how their layout worked (until you wanted height 100% of course).

</comment><comment><USER58> About map/area: Some websites still use them, and really well too. The Team Fortress 2 website[0] uses them with the images at the top of the page to link each of the characters' description pages.

[0]: [https://teamfortress.com/](https://teamfortress.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> You guys ever saw the Captain Marvel promo site, made in the style of the 90s web? It's f---ing brilliant.

[https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel/](https://www.marvel.com/captainmarvel/)

<comment><USER59> That is great, but how ridiculous is it that this microsite is made with 100% js dom manipulation instead of just static html? I wonder if they did that because using static html would have potentially not rendered the way they intended on all the current devices...

<comment><USER60> that would only make it more authentic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> the webpages in the 90s and early 00s are so random. Today almost every goddamn webpage looks like something derived from bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER62> Does anyone remember messing around with 'chromeless windows'?

A misleading phrase that means something completely different to a newer generation...

<comment><USER18> I remember making a page that when browsed to, would pop up an all-black full- screen "chromeless window" and start slowly typing green text Matrix-style. Very neat trick in those early-teens years...

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> > This was also the era of "web-safe colors" — a palette of 216 colors, where > every channel was one of 00, 33, 66, 99, cc, or ff — which existed because > some people still had 256-color monitors! The things we take for granted > now, like 24-bit color.

Ah, I remember so many evolutions of my own websites using 336699 and 6699ff as the main colors. I still default to them even now when I just need _something_ that isn't default colors.

And wow, I forgot all about image maps! I used to stare in awe of the super artistic websites that used image maps heavily, as if I was witnessing the blackest of black magic.

</comment><comment><USER64> Does anyone know if there's a "CSS Zen Garden" for Flash?

I heard about Flash games archival efforts a while ago, so I wonder what became of that (and if they included weird websites in their efforts too).

I remember a magazine I had that was full of crazy flash sites. I recently fondly remembered Fly Guy (still works in Firefox!)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20050317021634/http://www.trevor...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050317021634/http://www.trevorvanmeter.com/flyguy/)

<comment><USER65> [https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/)

</comment></comment><comment> rfsn-alex What about spacer.gif?!

<comment><USER66> A bit of explanation: In the old days of table layouts, the width attribute of a dt element would declare the maximum width of that element only. In order to provide a minimum width, you'd insert a transparent 1x1px image and give it the appropriate width. This could be used both for flexible (min, max) layouts and rigid designs, where everything would be positioned by a system of pole- like transparent images, much like in a Dali painting.

Note on both frames and tables: Right from the beginning, you could declare width and height units in HTML both in percent and in absolute units, like "px". However, Netscape browsers used internally only percents! Meaning, if you you intended to span the entire width of a document, Netscape would convert your absolute units to percent and from this back to px (using integer math for speed) and you would end up with some rounding error depending on the width of the browser window, which could add up to a deviation of 4px or so. Which was, of course, a constant pain, when you intended to line up elements, like a logo on top and a structure with a navigation and a main content area in different colors below.

<comment><USER47> Wow.

I was doing Web development in 1999 for a year or too

I never got that deep.

But I recall clearly adopting a left/right column for static content and center column for the CGI output custom stuff.

Choose that format because IIRC it was easy to implement in straight HTML

I looked at CSS then, but it did not make sense business wise when we could make vanilla HTML work.

It was a different world

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> > _No, Firefox really got a foothold because it had tabs. IE 6 did not have > tabs;_

I don't think this is right. Firefox got a major foothold because it blocked ads.

This was right as those ads that would open 4 new windows when you closed a previous window started showing up on the web and IE6 could not handle them. It would literally kill your browsing experience and sometimes blue screen your computer. Firefox was the first mainstream browser to block pop ups out of the box and it worked.

<comment><USER68> Before switching to Firefox, I previously used Internet Explorer, which had no tabs support. In an era of frequent pop-ups, your desktop ended being a mess.

It was annoying, but that is what I was used to. Then Firefox came and allowed to have all your browsing in the same window, without polluting the taskbar.

In my case, I clearly remember that tabs were the reason to switch into Firefox.

<comment><USER69> I had similar reasons with one more anecdote: my first internet access was through a Nokia 2G phone and I « dialed » to connect in Windows XP. Thank you Nokia PC Suite (which I could only get from the Byte magazine CDs and DVDs).

But boy, IE6 was painful! And i needed tabs to open pages and do something else while I wait for pages to load. That made me switch to Firefox after Opera. It wasn't that long ago, I think 2007 sorts?

In my job now, I still try to make sure people can access my pages with as little resources as needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> CSS has gotten great, but I feel things have gone in opposite direction for general web dev.

Careful cascading styles and clean and readable markup have gone straight out the window.

<comment><USER71> Like with all things, it depends!

Since HTML5's introduction of a bunch of new elements, I like to think markup has the potential to be a lot more readable and semantic now than it ever did when I first starting making websites in the 90s, even/especially given such a broad new range of element types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I think image maps are due for a comeback. There has to be a creative and beneficial use for this, right? That shit seemed like magic in 1998.

</comment><comment><USER73> Those gridded links remind me of the NeoPets site which would overlay a very busy "map" image with a tiny link, which would take you to a page with tons of powerful items. You used to be able to find the link with tab - <USER2> accessibility feature that barely highlighted / cycled through links. They simply removed that accessibility feature from their page.

</comment><comment><USER44> > With IE 6's dominance, it was as if the entire Web was frozen in time.

Hello Chrome. This is why I use Firefox.

> The W3C's solution was XML, because their solution to fucking everything in > the early 2000s was XML.

Ha! Man, got that right for sure. XML/JSX is one reason I just chose to avoid React Native in favor of Flutter, I've this avoided XML and would like to keep that streak going.

</comment><comment><USER74> I still have some of my stuff from this era up on the web. The source has all kinds of CSS hacks called out.

* A two-column layout [http://dionidium.com/design/leftbar/leftbar.html](http://dionidium.com/design/leftbar/leftbar.html)

* A valid XHTML 1.1 version of that layout [http://dionidium.com/design/leftbar/xhtml11/](http://dionidium.com/design/leftbar/xhtml11/)

* Two-column layout with equal heights [http://dionidium.com/design/column/](http://dionidium.com/design/column/)

* My old "default styles" stylesheet [http://dionidium.com/design/default.css](http://dionidium.com/design/default.css)

This was a fun read!

</comment><comment><USER75> IIRC, around the time of NCSA Mosaic, SGML was a developing standard for being able to do <b>bold</b> <i> _italics_ </i> and <u>underline</u>. I think I like markdown better but I digress.

Speaking of shady SEO leeches, "Block pop-up windows" was a dominant preference. In my browser TenFourFox (Firefox), this "off by default" preference has moved to about:preferences > Content > Block pop-up windows. But, it doesn't matter because JavaScript has brought back the annoying popup. At least, popups are constrained within the browser window. uBlock Origin and uMatrix help to the point where some/many "modern" web pages render as a blank page.

</comment><comment><USER76> Yeah this was a wonderful trip back in time for me too. I graduated high school in 1999 so I got to spend a couple teenage years playing around with HTML. I identify strongly with the "copy cool stuff from other teenagers' sites".

At my first web development job in the early 2000's I did some work with SGML. I forget now what I was specifying, but I remember finding it really interesting to be able to understand DTD's. It was like seeing the DNA of HTML. I also remember the miracles to productivity that were Firebug and jQuery!

</comment><comment><USER77> This was a redeeming article for me. I remember volunteering with a friend to update our university department's website back in 1997. The budget for that was 0, so volunteering sophomores like us was the best they could get. The result was a more consistent, but still fugly website. I always thought that this was because we were completely clueless, but now I realize that fugly websites was the norm back then.

</comment><comment><USER78> This is something. I remember times when inline styling was the thing. I have started my journey with web development. Then I left, busy with high school social life. Then, at the university I came back. And everything has changed: css files, some crazy JavaScript + jQuery effects etc. And now here we are: front-end development is heavily focused on JavaScript only, powered by frameworks. Time flies like crazy.

</comment><comment><USER79> Great article! CSS has become so easy to work with after css flexbox and various css preprocessors became available. I remember how excited we were in 1995 when we discovered we could use ta les and gif spacers to achieve almost any kind of page layout for our clients. The web is a big stack of different hacks that slowly improves over the years. CSS has become wull continue to evolve for many years.

</comment><comment><USER80> If you ever feel nostalgic for using that beautiful thing which was IE3 or NN3 or pre-JS Opera, they're all welcome on my forum website.

</comment><comment><USER81> No, I don't miss those days. Making a website look the same in Opera/Mozilla/IE was an insane challenge. The approach I've found worked best was going Opera first, then adapt to Mozilla and IE, in that order. That way the amount of work was minimal. If you did go IE first, ... well, you wouldn't succeed anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER82> Considering how repetitive pre-CSS web development could be, I'm surprised a templating framework for compiling static HTML files didn't catch on. These days, we have things like Sass, but we also have CSS, so there isn't as big of a needs as there was in the late 90's.

<comment><USER30> It was called DreamWeaver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Now I remember why Flash websites were popular in the early 2000s. I am glad css caught up!

</comment><comment><USER84> CSS layout is, in more than one way, like string semantics in c++. A whole lot of innovation and a few gross missteps happened there, with the side effect of pushing everyone and also the language itself forward

</comment><comment><USER85> I wonder what is the energy needs of css vs js vs rendering on morden browsers

</comment><comment><USER86> Started doing HTML in 97 so this brings a lot of memories like using a lot of <marquee> and <blink> on my first Geocities site. :)

Nice write up. I also learned a couple of things I didn't know about grids too!

<comment><USER87> Ah, <marquee>, the Sonic to <blink>'s Mario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> Cool article. I remember waiting for things like border-radius to have the prefixes removed too. Also, flexbox has turned my world upside down. Chrome had just come out when I was learning web dev.

Get off my lawn. :)

</comment><comment><USER89> >>> [<br />] might lead you to believe that <script/> is an empty <script> tag — but in HTML, it definitely is not!

? What is "<script/>"?

<comment><USER90> The script tag can't have an ending slash, so the browser turns it into a regular script tag. Since there's no closing one, the rest of the website becomes the content of that script element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Hacker News "webmaster" stopped in 90's.

<comment><USER92> And it is better that way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> What's hilarious, it's mostly the same "old" css that you still have to work today for html emails :(

</comment><comment><USER94> What a great trip down memory lane...

</comment><comment><USER33> Then there is _new_ new CSS with styled-components where you don't need classes anymore!

</comment><comment><USER95> > especially now that flexbox and grid have solved all our problems.

That is certainly not the case. Look at [https://eev.ee/media/2020-02-css/thumbnail- grids.html#grid](https://eev.ee/media/2020-02-css/thumbnail-grids.html#grid)

Large gaps of empty space. A manual layout would pack the thumbnails much more densely.

<comment><USER96> That's because the author intentionally added gaps via "grid-gap:10px" and changed the alignment via "align-items:baseline". You could easily undo either of these styles to achieve the desired effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> for layout , i still think tables did it right, because web is primarily a grid like newspapers. wish we had a <grid> type of element with responsive rows and cols, if only to help with vertical alignment and those missing </div>s

<comment><USER5> Html tables are not all comparable to newspaper columns. Newspaper-style columns (where text flows from the from bottom of one column to the top of the next column) can be achieved with the "columns" property in CSS.

But newspaper-style columns are not as useful on the web, since it is really annoying if the columns are longer then the screen and you have to scroll up and down. In that respect the web is very different than newspaper layouts where the dimensions are fixed.

As for <grid>, layout should be specified in CSS rather than through the html element, which is why we have "display: table", "display: grid" etc. in CSS, which should do what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> lol [https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1223913737540657153](https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1223913737540657153)

</comment><comment><USER99> There should be less specialized languages. The web should work more on mediums like WASM so all supported languages share the same functionality. Everything CSS can define can be done in full programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER100> such a good read. was always wondering how things went back in the 90s with internet and web development in particular.

seems like an internet wild west

</comment><comment><USER101> Web technologies are barbarianism.

We've been laying out pages for hundreds of years. I suspect that this would be a much shorter article if Microsoft/Netscape/Opera/et.al had consulted with experts in that business first, rather than re-invent the entire process from first principles.

Won't drop any shade on TBL for this mess though. V1.0 seemed more focused on information access than design.

<comment><USER5> Page layout for print is very different than for screen. It was designers with a print background which insisted on writing "Best viewed on a 640x480 monitor with 24bit color. Please maximize your browser window for the optimal experience" on websites back in day.

Actually I think the designers of CSS consulted traditional print too much, by adding confusing and useless stuff like "pt" measurements.

<comment><USER101> Print people at the time had no idea what 640x480x24 even means. That was all IT dorks and amateur self-styled "designers." (i.e. barbarians)

The Bringhurst book was published 1992. Web tech learned zero from that book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> > Still, it was better than tables.

Well, no. Nothing wrong at all with tables.

<comment><USER5> Yes and no, but there is some confusion due to terminology.

There are HTML tables, created with the <table> tag, and then there are CSS layout tables created with the "display:table" property. Neither are inherently good or bad, it is just a question of when they are appropriate.

The problem with tables back in the day was that browsers didn't support "display:table", so the _only_ way to get a grid-like layout was to use the <table>-tag. In cases when the content wasn't semantically a table, you had a dilemma. Either you would have to abuse the <table> tag thereby hurting accessibility, or you would have to use CSS floats and hacks to achieve the desired grid-like effect. Neither was really desirable.

Today we have "display:table", but we also have flexbox and grid which is are much more powerful, so the use of tables-for-layout are mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER41> > browsers didn't support "display:table"

Internet Explorer on Windows was the singular offender. ISTR that other ones with at least 0.7% market share were implementing the display property correctly.

A desirable solution was to just paper over the bugs and other shortcomings with Javascript: [https://github.com/seancoyne/ie7-js](https://github.com/seancoyne/ie7-js)

That way one could simply write standard compliant code and not waste any time with hacks and float work-arounds.

<comment><USER47> "Internet Explorer on Windows was"... 90% plus of the market

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> Netscape ran on Unix platforms.. buggy or not its support was vastly more important than IE on an ethical level.

<comment><USER104> I used NN3 and 4 back in the day (and still do, kinda, Firefox is still my main browser), but man, writing CSS for Netscape was a nightmare!

I still remember that weird bug that forced everyone to create a single, empty, invisible DIV at the beginning of the page if you wanted to set absolute positions for the other DIVs in the page.

In Javascript land, we all had our little script to detect the browser and do things like finding the element you wanted (IIRC, only IE had find by id).

All in all, I miss the carefulness webdevs had to have at the time (I remember uglifying my files by hand to make everything weight less than 24KB, which was the self-imposed limit we had at the dotcom I worked at) but, in general, I don't miss those days at all.

<comment><USER105> NN didn't actually do CSS, it did JSS (Javascript Style Sheets, something Netscape hoped would fly) with an added translation layer. That meant that you could only style an element through its hierarchy (since there was no equivalent of IE's document.all in Netscape's DOM). $DEITY help you if you were trying to do a hybrid tables/CSS thing, especially with nested tables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> Nice article. Surprised it does not mention the acid tests [https://www.acidtests.org/](https://www.acidtests.org/)

<comment><USER107> Acid1 and Acid2 are kinda legacy. Acid1 is so old that IE6 passes it. Acid2 was mentioned in an article.

Acid3 is kinda... controversial. Its tests were kinda nonsensical and hardly useful. Some of things it asked for (in particular about SVG fonts) were implemented minimally, just to pass the tests.

A lot of Acid3 tests involved checking the error code for weird edge cases specifically, stuff like testing whether `document.createElementNS(null, "d:iv")` throws `NamespaceError` (browsers these days throw `InvalidCharacterError`). This isn't really useful for web developers, because actual websites won't test for edge cases like this. It's to the point where Servo (a web engine written in Rust) outright asks the user to report a bug in Servo if unpaired surrogates in DOM are used on a page that isn't Acid3. So far all the bug reports were for Acid3.

<comment><USER108> > A lot of Acid3 tests involved checking the error code for weird edge cases > specifically

If the browsers implement these specification details correctly you don't have to have all these workarounds that make web development incredibly tedious and unpredictable. That's the point.

Of course it's impossible to predict outright which things are going to be used and which things aren't. Otherwise you could just not create a specification for the useless parts.

<comment><USER107> Not really. A lot of DOM tests involve try/catch, and checking whether the exceptions are precisely right. Web applications tend to not intentionally throw exceptions.

Acid3 also tested some other things like SVG fonts. SVG fonts specification didn't make any sense, browsers were against implementing an under-defined specification not designed to interact with HTML and Acid3 test authors likely realized this, because a lot of tests were like: a web browser can do this or this or this, because we have no idea what the specification requires. You really don't want a standard like this in a web browser. Web browsers implemented bare minimum sufficient for Acid3, but literally nothing else. WOFF won over SVG fonts in the end as it was a better specification, but Acid3 insisted on SVG fonts. Case in point about issues with SVG fonts: what should `<iframe>` in an SVG font do? The specification won't tell you.

Some other tests also feel weird. For instance, test 86 is literally checking whether `new Date().setMilliseconds()` returns `NaN`. I mean, that doesn't seem very useful to me, why would anyone pass no arguments to a setter intentionally? Official ECMAScript Conformance Test Suite would be a better place for this test.

What I think is fine in Acid3 is CSS selector tests, the rest is honestly kinda pointless. I have the same issue with Acid2, the CSS tests in it were fine, but Acid2 test also decided to include an SGML comments test for who knows what reason. Web browser vendors were against this test, but had to support it anyway. SGML comment test broke real world web sites without providing any real value. Thankfully, this test is now gone from Acid2.

I hope Acid4 won't happen or if it will, it will ONLY have CSS tests and won't test anything else. Although, it likely won't (thankfully) due to The Web Standards Project's closure.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turn Off All Security - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/blob/master/test/resources/firefox/prefs.js#L14 <comment><USER2> This seems to be a firefox pref that the shumway devs are using during their automation tests.

You can find it being used in many places across mozilla source code. [https://github.com/search?q=org%3Amozilla+turn_off_all_secur...](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Amozilla+turn_off_all_security_so_that_viruses_can_take_over_this_computer&type=Code)

You can also find a number of tickets asking for it to be removed, this one is 6 years old :D [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=984012](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=984012)

</comment><comment><USER3> Context: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=984012](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=984012) (developers discussion on whether to remove it or not). It appears to be an option solely designed for testing purpose, but has been used by some exploits after it escalated privileges (which shouldn't matter, since the exploit already succeeded and there are a thousand ways to do the same), too.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is this notable? It's just within an automated test...

</comment><comment><USER5> Some context would be nice.</comment>


Show HN: Keychain for the Square Card Reader - <AUTHOR> https://www.etsy.com/listing/181764272/square-key-ring I hated carrying the Square card reader in my pocket, so I made a key chain for it. <comment><USER2> That's pretty cool! I need to get one for me and my business partner!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hated carrying the reader in my pocket, so I made a keychain for it.</comment>


Julian Assange Rolling Stone interview - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/julian-assange-the-rolling-stone-interview-20120118 <comment><USER2> Amazing guy. I'd be interested to here a more nuanced discussion with him about when it is or isn't justifiable to keep something secret.

<comment><USER3> I think he missed an opportunity, there. One of the stickiest claims against Wikileaks, at least among the tech crowd, is that they stand for radical transparency and believe government should hold no secrets. I would have liked him to expound on exactly what secrets the government can or should keep, as it seems fairly central to their mission. By not doing so, I think he allowed the narrative put forth by his critics to retain dominance.

<comment><USER4> What's missing from this question/answer?

> Do you think governments should be allowed to keep some secrets?

> This is a question that is much more interesting than the answer. In some > cases – tracking down organized crime, say – government officials have an > obligation to keep their investigations secret at the moment that they are > performing them. Similarly, a doctor has an obligation to keep information > about your medical records secret under most circumstances. This is a > question about obligations. It is absurd to suggest that simply because a > police officer may have the obligation to keep secret certain information > relating to an investigation, that the entire world also must be subject to > a coercive force.

I don't think you can get much more specific than that. It's a fuzzy issue.

<comment><USER3> I think an exposition of a state's right to secrecy in regards to national security and diplomacy would have been helpful, as that's the area to which most of Wikileaks' criticisms are addressed. Specifically, I would like to hear what information a government or military:

a) _Should_ keep secret (troop movements, etc)

b) _May_ keep secret (?)

c) _May not_ keep secret (abuses, human rights violations, etc)

Furthermore, I would like to see similar answers in regards to international diplomacy. A "horse's mouth" statement on the matter would go a long way towards alleviating confusion.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the question of what should be open vs secret is a very interesting debate, because the bulk of that answer is largely agreed upon. I think the more interesting discussion is answering this problem: How can a government have the ability to keep secret those things that are necessary, in a way that disallows (or minimizes) the ability to abuse that power to keep other things secret as well?

I agree that having an explicit statement that there may exist military and diplomatic secrets that are legitimate would help convince the people (like myself) who think his positions are too extreme to be useful.

<comment><USER6> "In some cases – tracking down organized crime, say – government officials have an obligation to keep their investigations secret at the moment that they are performing them." -- Julian Assange, in the linked article

Seems like a straightforward statement that he believes there are legitimate secrets for a state to keep, at least temporarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A great interview. But as I read it, one section jumped out as verifiably odd.

      Back when we last did a survey, in February, there were a total of 33 million
      references on the Internet to the word "rape" in any context, from Helen of Troy
      to the Congo. If you search for "rape" and my name, there were just over 20
      million. In other words, perceptively, two-thirds of all rapes that have ever
      happened anywhere in the world, ever, have something to do with me.

Obviously, "back when we last did a survey" means anything done now "doesn't count", but: Googling "rape" returns 226M pages. Googling "'Julian Assange' 'rape'" returns 4.2M pages. Still an interestingly high number ("'Kobe Bryant' 'rape'" returns 1.6M pages; "'Roman Polanski' 'rape'" is 4.5M), but not the two-thirds number he uses. I think that's what feeds the "ego" accusations.

<comment><USER8> It saddens me a little bit that this is the current top post on this subject. I have no problem with pedantic fact checking, but it is hardly the most pertinent issue in the interview.

<comment><USER7> My post is hardly pedantic fact checking. The intro talks about how many consider Assange a "megalomaniac" and he seems bewildered by the suggestion. My point clearly suggests that thinking 2/3rds of the time people talk about rape they're talking about you suggests an over-inflated sense of self- importance. (Also, for what it's worth: roughly 90% of what he says can't be fact checked. One thing that is close to verifiable is demonstrably false, though twelvechairs offers an explanation that's closer to his made-up numbers. That's pretty central to the topic of Assange, though I leave that as an implication for the reader.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found his comment about Swedish prisons to be interesting. From what I've heard and read, Swedish prisons (and Scandinavian ones in general) are some of the most mild in the world.

<comment><USER10> I think he answers your question: "That's because in 47 percent of cases, prisoners in Sweden are held incommunicado."

I've read (in comments on blogs, so apply grain of salt) that the prosecutor in Sweden has requested that he be held in detention incommunicado, and that this is normal practice in Sweden for foreigners awaiting trial. And then the Swedes can slowly, slowly prepare for a trial and he can perhaps disappear for 1 year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would be extremely interested to find the source of Assange's idea that the prisons in Sweden are the worst in Europe. I've tried searching <http://www.ipcaworldwide.org/>, but perhaps my Google-skills are failing me.

I'm probably not objective since I am from Sweden, but his description is very far from my perception of the Swedish judicial system. I don't agree with every verdict I read about, but I guess that would be the case in which ever country I lived in. In general it seems quite fair to me.

My guess is that Assange will be cleared of all charges or worst case senteced to a conditional sentence if he ever stands trial (which will not necessarily happen even). It seem to me that he is a man of dubious moral standards regarding women (trying to have sex with someone without a condom when they explicitly wanted to use a condom), but that will generally not make you go to prison (and probably rightfully so).

I'm a bit depressed that his behavior has damaged Wikileaks and their cause which is important.

edit: Would appreciate a comment from people down-voting me.

<comment><USER3> So, based on two unanswered, unsupported, and unproven allegations, you are willing to claim that "he is a man of dubious moral standards", and that this behaviour has hurt Wikileaks?

Are you not slightly more disturbed by the clear political machinations behind the case?

<comment><USER11> As I wrote; that's the way it -seem- to me. I'm convinced that he will get a fair trial in Sweden and I don't understand why it would be reasonable to think that he should not be interrogated by the Swedish police when accused of a crime (whether guilty or not). Remember that it has still not been decided if he should be tried for the crime he is accused of or not, that is why they are trying to get him extradited to Sweden.

And no, I don't see any "clear political machinations" in this case, I see a horny dude who doesn't like to use a condom. I'm sorry if this is a too simple of an explanation for your taste. I could be wrong of course.

If there were any political reasons for this I'm quite sure that they could have framed him for something more grave and produced obvious evidence.

<comment><USER12> I encourage you to read the article! I'm one pg-down click through and:

"The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on February 1st – but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called "red notice" for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in "connection with a number of sexual offenses" – Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an "orange notice" – and the U.S. government has branded him a "high-tech terrorist," unleashing a massive and unprecedented investigation designed to depict Assange's journalism as a form of international espionage."

So he's more wanted than Qaddafi. If that doesn't make you think about the political motivations behind this a bit more, I'm not sure what could.

I don't know if he's a horny dude or not. Probably. But that doesn't mean his case isn't being blown far out of proportion for political cause. How many other Swedish strict-legal-definition-of-rape cases have Interpol flags out more severe than those of known repressive dictator madmen?

I bet not many.

<comment><USER13> You need to look into what interpol notices mean, they don't correspond to how wanted a person is. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol_notice>

Assange should have turned himself over to the police in the beginning instead of leaving Sweden with such haste and refusing to be heard by the swedish police. Instead he used the political climate surrounding wikileaks as an excuse to stay away and started to paint a picture of Sweden as a third world country regarding it's legal system. It's classic stalling technique, the longer he can stay away the less the other witnesses and himself remembers.

<comment><USER14> That post is a ridiculous misrepresentation of what happened. Assange _went to police_ and they said the case was going to be dropped and he could go. Then he left because he had other places to be.

Post flagged for spreading misinformation.

<comment><USER13> That was before they raised the accusations to rape again, when he was only accused of sexual molestation. After the renewed rape charges he left before the police had held a new interrogation.

Also, the police never said the case was going to be dropped, he was heard for sexual molestation after the rape charges had been dropped by the procecutor, the day after they were raised in the first place. That charged (sexual molestation) have never been dropped, instead new charges have been added. But that's ok, I wont flag your post.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Rader – The simple chrome extension that makes you read what you save - <AUTHOR> http://rukshn.github.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the creator of the Reader extension. If you want to clarify any questions feel free to comment and let me know :)</comment>


Show HN: A simpler, more convenient travel experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilesuitesapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently live at ~700 hotels, primarily Starwood & Hyatt brands: Westin, W, St. Regis, Le Meridien, Hyatt, Grand Hyatt, Hyatt Place, Hyatt Regency.

Please leave a comment if there's a specific hotel that you'd like to see added to the platform!

</comment><comment><USER2> On my last vacation, I had to call the front desk and ask to be connected to room service 4 times before someone finally picked up. -- The Mark Hotel NYC needs to be on this app.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks great - would love to see the Four Seasons Miami on there! Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We'll get the Four Seasons Miami on the app asap, and I'll let you know when it's available.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Js-cookie – An open source cookie API derived from jQuery cookie - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/js-cookie/js-cookie/#readme <comment><AUTHOR> This library was born when we decided to remove the jquery dependency from jquery-cookie. Since then it was entirely built on community feedback, including every line of the documentation.

The source code is not very legible, but that's a conscious decision made to decrease the gzipped size of the minified file.

Also, we have 100% practical integration test coverage (because the cost is small), even for AMD/UMD and every character that is disallowed in RFC 6265.</comment>


Darpa Lays Out Tech for 100-Year Starship Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.innovationnewsdaily.com/darpa-100-year-starship-2059/ <comment><USER2> Someone should tell them that they are doing a poor job at gathering input. They need to be sure to extend the deadline once or twice and market it like crazy. It should be available in every language and listed in Google for every country in every language. There needs to be a significant reward in gold (not any currency) for solutions/ideas chosen. If the U.S. offered up 2% of their gold supply (hell, the dollar will devalue anyway so what the hell do we care?) for this purpose, I'm sure that countries and private industry around the world would be interested in helping out.</comment>


NSA "Only" Touches 1.6% of daily Internet traffic - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/dont-worry-nsa-sayswe-only-touch-1-6-of-daily-global-internet-traffic/

<comment><USER2> Because they don't check spam.</comment>


Show HN: Host your own email service in Docker - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adaline/dockermail

<comment><USER2> It's useful for me

<comment><AUTHOR> Very glad its useful to you, I'm currently doing lots of development on the project so look out for updates.</comment></comment>


What Killed the Jingle? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/what-killed-the-jingle/497291/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I think one of the obvious reasons to buy an existing pop song today instead of using a jingle is that is contextual proven. Updating a jingle is probably a far greater risk.

I think some recent artist have been accused of purposely writing songs to sell. There is an urban myth that X Ambassador wrote "Renegade" just for Jeep (reality is they were working on the song anyway) [1]. The myth though is not far from the truth. I wonder how many other artist are thinking hmm this song could work great for a commercial. I have wondered if Rachel Platten was thinking that when she wrote fight song... that song is so emotional syrupy... it was made to be sold for advertising (I thought for sure though it would be used in the olympics but lost that bet to my wife).

[1]: [http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/how-jeep- fou...](http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/how-jeep-found- perfect-song-launch-its-renegade-campaign-164125)

<comment><USER3> There's definitely a sense that some artists are intentionally writing for the "drop pile" (songs easily and cheaply licensed) of Ad Execs and Marketing.

Several electronic artists, Celldweller being the big one off the top of my head, have been somewhat intentionally building instrumental works just for the off chance that Hollywood wants something "epic ready" for a film trailer. (He has an entire "series" of albums geared towards this called Soundtrack for the Voices in My Head. Several of them will probably have heard before in film trailers.)

Even one of my cousins' bands engaged with this in a meta-joking way by titling one of their recent albums "Music for Car Commercials".

<comment><USER4> Vaporwave[1] is an entire music genre around ironically sampling business background music and ads specific music

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporwave)

Edit : the label Business Casual is a good start [http://music.businesscasual.biz/#_=_](http://music.businesscasual.biz/#_=_)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The proclamation that jingles are dead isn't true and the best ones will never die. This is evidenced by the fact we still reference Folgers, Dr. Pepper, etc. I appreciate the comments about Japan and Korea as I wouldn't be aware of those otherwise.

Like most things advertising evolved and since mass appeal is the objective it makes sense that pop songs, which are simple and catchy would fill the role that jingles once played.

Pop songs, however, are relatively expensive, and even more so if you have an effective commercial that you want to run a lot.

Without doing any additional searching I can name 2 great, current jingles running here is Los Angeles. Powell Electric's, "...we'll fix it in a flash..." and Empire Carpet, "...call Empire Today..."

So now I think they fill the purpose of lower budget commercials, but they are still a live and they are still a great tool for the right job.

<comment><USER6> I can attest to the staying power of Empire's jingle here in Chicagoland. Especially their phone number, included in the jingle here. That, and (see if you can complete it in your head, Chicagoans): 773-202-

And the jingle for the Kars for Kids charity is the sort of ear worm that makes me change the station when I hear the first strum of the guitar accompaniment, but it's done its job and gotten stuck in my head. "1-877-KARS 4 KIDS; K A R S, Kars for Kids".

Jingles work for the audience who hears them. Plenty still listen to radio on their commutes.

<comment><USER7> What?! When I was a kid in the Chicago area (late 70s), Empire was "588-2-300....Empiiiiiire." When did the number change?

<comment><USER8> I also recall 5-8-8-2-300. And that's the number on the website, and the one that still plays on WGN.

Grandparent post is referring to 7-7-3-2-oh-2-LUNA!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jingles are cheesy but many of them stick with you for a long time. "Best part of waking up, is Folger's in your cup", "Kiss a little longer... hold tight a little longer... longer with Big Red", "I'm a pepper, she's a pepper, he's a pepper wouldn't you like to be a pepper to" and probably hundreds of others. Maybe it was just hearing them so many times when TV and entertainment were more limited and linear, but they definitely worked.

</comment><comment><USER10> I really hate it when advertisements hijack existing music, especially when it is classical music.

<comment><USER11> You could imagine my surprise when hearing The Kronos Quartet teme for _Requiem For A Dream_ being used in a trailer for one of the _Lord of the Rings_ franchise pictures.

The one that cracks me up still is Carnival cruises using Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" which coincidentally a lot of people associate with the film _Trainspotting_.

<comment><USER12> For a while there was a car ad that used a clip from Meatloaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights", specifically the portion of the song which references the title.

For context, the song itself is about a man trapped in a loveless relationship after swearing to his girlfriend that he would love her to the end of time so that she'd come across in the car, leading to the titular paradise. Now, though, he's "praying for the end of time to hurry up and arrive, 'cause if I gotta spend another minute with you I don't think that I can survive".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Except in Japan where jingles are still thriving like nothing happened.

<comment><USER14> A lot of things are thriving in Japan that already died out in the rest of the world. Like fax machines and hand drawn animation.

<comment><USER15> And vice versa. Using movie stars in TV ads is the new new in America, but is old hat in Japan. Tommy Lee Jones, Arnold, Bruce Willis and Scarlett Johansson are the only ones that I can recall in the past few years here.

<comment><USER13> Local stars are used all in the as well in Japanese commercials. Idols, Actors/Actresses, Singers, etc... all because Dentsuu is basically in control of what goes on TV and they tend to enforce the use of personalities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. But no mention of any studies or tests whether jingles are actually effective. Perhaps advertisers discovered they just don't work at selling products.

<comment><USER17> Bingo. I have tons of jingles stuck in my head for products I have never bought nor world consider buying.

There are a few things that advertising is good for. One is spreading familiarity with a brand, but that has limits, especially with already well known brands. The other is psychological priming. You can actually hijack people's brains and change their enjoyment of a product through advertising by creating associations. This is similar to the way we have "comfort foods" that we associate with, say, being at home, etc. Advertising can prime your experience of a product and enhance your enjoyment of it, and also make it more memorable. Then you start layering your own experiences on top of that kernel and you build up something like a pearl of personal associations around that product. This is the true power of advertising, and it's huge. Jingles, I suspect, don't always play into that aspect or create much priming.

<comment><USER18> >Jingles, I suspect, don't always play into that aspect or create much priming.

you say that as you instantly recall each and every product associated with the jingles you remember. you may not think it's influencing you but when you goto the supermarket late at night,tired after a hard day at work and get the message - oh be sure to get some [food item]. do you go with the brand name you remember(your eyes hunt down the specific look and name of the product even) or the generic thing just a few steps over that costs a little less?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Best. Jingle. Ever.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS18jHMmhAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS18jHMmhAI)

</comment><comment><USER20> > "who has been nicknamed "The King of the Jingle" and whose greatest hits > include the long-running "Nationwide Is On Your Side""

I really have no idea where she learned it, since really no media she consumes contains ads, but I've heard my 4 year old daughter sing "Nationwide is on your side" on multiple occasions. It's both cute and kind of terrifying.

<comment><USER21> Probably from the olympics. It seemed like Nationwide was every other commercial during the breaks.

<comment><USER20> Ahh, yes, she was watching a decent amount of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Jingles sure are less popular these days.

The SNCF "jingle" comes to mind as one I've heard recently, though [1]. It's very distinctive, just like advertising jingles.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA5MwhuHWLo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA5MwhuHWLo)

</comment><comment><USER23> Barry Manilow was successful in the pop music world, and also wrote several well-known jingles[1][2]. Many/most didn't know he wrote them until long after they had been established.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=bar...](https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=barry+manilow+jingles&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) [2] [http://barrynethomepage.com/commercialjingles.html](http://barrynethomepage.com/commercialjingles.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> There's a great episode of Crap From The Past[0] about pop songs that started out as commercial jingles[1]. The most surprising one to me was the Carpenter's hit "We've only Just Begun".

[0] [http://www.crapfromthepast.com/](http://www.crapfromthepast.com/) [1] [https://archive.org/details/cftp-2015-11-20](https://archive.org/details/cftp-2015-11-20)

</comment><comment><USER25> First thing that comes to my mind is the Nationwide jingle, and lately, hearing Peyton Manning hum it. Anyone know how long the Nationwide jingle has been around?

There are definitely still a lot of jingles that I instantly recognize or can think of (like other posters mentioned here, Folgers is definitely another one).

<comment><USER26> _Anyone know how long the Nationwide jingle has been around?_

Decades, as I recall it from when I was a child, and I've got more days behind me than ahead of me. I'm surprised to hear that they're still using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What about in podcasts?

<comment><USER28> No Agenda is a good example. The show utilizes jingles, songs, and soundbites for entertainment reasons rather than commercial. Too many to list (or find), but a few examples below.

In The Morning Breakfast jingle: [https://clyp.it/1jlijg2g](https://clyp.it/1jlijg2g)

See Something, Say Something: [https://clyp.it/hcjt1i2g](https://clyp.it/hcjt1i2g)

Uber Spies acapella: [https://clyp.it/wgpj4jjh](https://clyp.it/wgpj4jjh)

Don't Look Over Here (Nothing To See Here): [https://clyp.it/on2d3pf3](https://clyp.it/on2d3pf3)

Monsanto: [https://clyp.it/ayuf1scs](https://clyp.it/ayuf1scs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > to be a pepper too

fixed

<comment><USER30> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12388563) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Time is broken, we need to fix it - <AUTHOR> http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2012/10/04/we-need-to-fix-time/

<comment><USER2> s/latitude/longitude/.

No arguments on the substantive points, although I am wary of software misinterpreting a time in an instant message, and therefore converting it in a way that doesn't make sense to either of the participants.</comment>


How to Raise Money from VCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/14/how-to-raise-money-from-vcs/ Check out the video in the article, pretty funny, useful and confusing all at once. <comment><USER2> I donno if I'd take any of his advice but I like him. He's cool. :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone else think this guy is a little crazy? =D</comment>