undefined | Better HN

0 pointsanticodon2y ago0 comments

In 2000-2010 not only I was a fullstack developer, but also had to write CSS and HTML code for the websites I worked on often.

I remember that as an extremely painful experience. I can't remember all the details, but I remember that until flexbox and grid were implemented, everything CSS related was a pain. I vaguely remember that until 2008-2009 (maybe I'm off by 1-2 years) something trivial as rounded corners also was a pain.

I also remember that about 80% of the CSS pain was caused by Microsoft Intenet Explorer 6.0. It was complete garbage when dealing with CSS and Javascript (I was working with huge JS codebases at the time). But nobody in the web world could ignore it because it had a huge market share. I hate that browser and Microsoft with passion till this day. So many hours, days, weeks wasted to make everything work in a browser that wasn't updated by MS (why spend money when everybody is using it - they even fired the team that worked on it) and had a very "specific" implementation of Web standards.

0 comments

xp842y ago

You’re 100% correct in your recollections and the frustration of using CSS in those days contributed to me not wanting to keep working on the front end at all. And yes, F MSIE all the way to hell How many thousands of human lifetimes were spent trying to make that piece of crap work.

I still don’t know flexbox because I had given up by then. Thankfully I can have ChatGPT help me these days if it comes up, but thankfully FE is not really a part of my normal job.

bombcar2y ago

If you want to relive hell, work on HTML emails. Yay for outlooks ie6 renderer :(

eska2y ago

I remember setting up rounded corner PNGs with IE compat shims because it couldn't handle transparency otherwise..

I also switched away from frontend dev because of this silliness eventually.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse