- It's funny how eternal the IE6/7/8 struggle felt at the time and now it's essentially ancient history. All that knowledge of how to coax CSS into doing things cross-browser circa 2004-2010 is basically useless to me now. Those years were my HS hobby -> college -> career transition period and it's amazing that I didn't give up because of how god damn convoluted basic frontend development was back then. And it was so discouraging because you could do things by the book (er, spec) and they'd work flawlessly in Firefox, but look assbackwards in IE6.
I love/hate that era so much.
by TimTheTinker
2 subcomments
- A lot of us felt like such pioneers in those days. Writing frontend web apps was an emerging and rapidly changing art. Those of us on the bleeding edge read Ajaxian.com and Douglas Crockford. I was writing internal SPA apps for Firefox+IE6 with Prototype.js and ExtJS.
My co-workers strongly disagreed with my approach -- to build for Firefox first, then hack it to work on IE. "Why bother when 95% of your users are on IE? That's a waste of time."
But those apps are still being used, almost 2 decades later, with no modifications required (besides a couple of weird edge case hacks for later versions of IE).
Always bet on the web.
by tylerchilds
3 subcomments
- my favorite ie css hack was
\IEversion
e.g.
width: 100%\9;
would only apply width: 100% to IE9.
it showed that even microsoft devs hated how css became a pissing match and needed a system to workaround their own mess.
i do not miss css hacks to support ie, but this approach to hacking ie was the best out of the lot
- 15 years ago, I write a sing about this called "IE is being mean to me":
https://youtu.be/vTTzwJsHpU8?si=JYWTMBjJKunrhitR
- Just seeing the date on the article as 19 years ago rather than 2005 hit a little harder than I expected
by quietbritishjim
0 subcomment
- Here's an archive.org link for the IE7 script link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240110054654/http://dean.edwar...
> IE7.js is a JavaScript library to make MSIE behave like a standards-compliant browser. It fixes many CSS issues and makes transparent PNG work correctly under IE5 and IE6.
- Adding to the pile of anecdotes of dirty browser hacks we're proud of: In 2002 (few years before Ajax went big) I rolled my own Ajax-y thing using a hidden iframe with a form inside it to send & receive data from the server while the user never saw a page reload. The app I used it on was for a client whose rather bad idea failed a year or so later but I'm proud of my part of it as a junior dev with a crazy idea!
- [flagged]
by fitsumbelay
0 subcomment
- good riddance
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