Relics of a bygone web era
Today, I am moving servers, since my webserver’s version of Ubuntu has been EOL (for several years). An unfortunate byproduct is that I have to say goodbye to my old WordPress blog which I made back in 2008, because it’s just not worth it to restore a non-mobile friendly blog that I stopped writing on. (I moved it here for now).
However one interesting part of this has been going through my old _assets folder, which contains amazing relics of a bygone web era. Scripts that everyone had on their site. If you “weaved dreams” in the 2000’s you probably remember them… the days when your main FTP client was Dreamweaver, and you were probably writing a lot of actionScript in Flash. Here are just a handful of scripts that were ubiquitous across the web about 10 years ago:
- csshover.htc was… well let me back up — .htc files were bundled javascript files for Internet Explorer. Yep, back in my day kids! You had to include csshover.htc just to get hover effects in IE, which was the most popular browser! And at first it didn’t work! Until you realized you forgot to link to the 1x1 pixel blank .gif file, which it needed to work. Oh god, we’ve come so far.
- niftycube.js, and it’s accompanying niftyCorners.css — these files made it possible to have rounded corners on things. Nowadays you kids just puppet a vagrant or whatever and you have a whole site built for you by a grunt… or a gulp. WHATEVER. Kids these days.
- swfobject.js — sigh. That’s how we embedded .swfs children. What’s a swf? That’s a compiled Flash file! Flash was the bread and butter of the internet at one time. Without swfobject.js, IE would puke an error message when you tried to embed a .swf in an <embed> tag, which is how we put Flash on the web.
- style-ie6.css— included with that weird comment conditional that only IE recognized… People complain about IE9 these days. HA! You don’t know what hell is until you’ve tried to make floated divs look right in IE6.
- PIE.htc — This was the incredible work of Jason Johnston, which consisted of a huge group of CSS3 polyfils for IE. You could include this file, along with using the obscure CSS property behavior in classes, linking to it, and get all that CSS3 goodness in IE. What a godsend.
Almost?? **Shiver**.
Well, that’s all we have time for today children. Count your blessings! The web has come a looooooong way, in a very short time.
