Post #3267179

2026-06-08 02:51 UTC

You do a few websites for friends, family, local businesses, you make a little bit of money. You didn't need a degree, for this. You didn't need to pay to go on a course and get a bit of paper, there WERE no bits of paper then, you could learn it for free and the websites you built were proof that you could build a website. That scared some folks?

Replies (3)

@ifixcoinops@retro.social 2026-06-08 03:01

Between all these things you learned Flash, which was a wonderful bit of software that let you make ANYTHING, and you also learned cascading style sheets, which, I cannot stress this enough, were complete fucking dogshit. Like, it's good today, it's normal today, it's the standard way of doing things today - but back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absolutely fucking impossible with CSS. It made everything harder, and it would be over a DECADE before anything got easier.

Open ##3267180
@web_goddess@aus.social 2026-06-08 02:52

@ifixcoinops@retro.social So far you are basically describing my career. 😳

Open ##3267220
@squishymage42@dice.camp 2026-06-08 02:59

@ifixcoinops@retro.social Oh, making a video game fan page on Angelfire in fourth grade on the brand new candy shell imacs, then learning the html that went with them. And slightly blatant overuse of blink tags (in my defense I was 9 and they seemed like the greatest thing ever along with marquee tags)

Open ##3267223