Post #3267180
2026-06-08 03:01 UTC
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.
Replies (1)
-
@ifixcoinops@retro.social 2026-06-08 03:06
During this time, web editors like Frontpage and Dreamweaver just outright fucking gave up. You don't drag and drop anymore, you don't highlight text and ctrl-I for italics anymore, it's all code, except instead of for italics it's now. What does do? It adds emphasis. How does it add emphasis? By making the text italic. It's this way because you might not want your emphasized text to be italic, you might want it to have a drop shadow or be bright red or some shit like that, and the idea of divorcing the content from the presentation was kinda the Whole Deal of CSS, so that kiiiinda makes sense, in the way that a lot of early CSS kiiiiinda made sense