CSS Curiosities of the Past

Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?

IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.

Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.

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.

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.

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.

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!

    > Internet Explorer had a number of iffy behaviours and lagged behind other browsers for many visual effects, even regarding basic properties like opacity. Thus, Microsoft brought in bespoke filter functionality.

The DirectX filters weren't used pretty much anywhere until it turned out it could do things that were specced and implemented by others years later.

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...)

I miss gaudy scrollbars.

Which of these old CSS tricks do you actually miss?

miss those days.

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

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

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.

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