I think it is a joke.

Also, as far as I can remember, you could never combine <marquee> and <blink> because only IE supported <marquee> and only the Netscape family of browsers supported <blink>.

I think there is a lot of humor in this article that is maybe a little too subtle.

My memory at this point is faded, but I thought that was the point? You used both of them to cover both the Netscape and IE cases.

(Hence, the joke, that to combine the two made you a Great Web Developer, since you knew about such things. The bar was rather low in those days, to be honest.)

I don't think so. <marquee> and <blink> do different things. <marquee> makes its content scroll across the page. <blink> makes it's content turn invisible and then reappear about once per second.

You could however nest horizontal and vertical marquee to make a diagonal marquee :)

Yes the whole thing is a joke, and is sarcastic. At least, that's the impression I got.

I worked at homeshark.com (later rebranded iown.com) in the 90's, and we absolutely did the spacer gif trick to size our tables.

Oh yeah, i think every one did - but they certainly werent used in "semantically correct containers".

Even HN, this very website, still uses spacer gifs. Sadly.

Spacer GIFs which are resized for narrow screens (300-750px) using CSS depending on the tag's width attribute. That's not a technique I've seen before:

> img[src='s.gif'][width='40'] {width: 12px;}

(from https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css)

I don't understand why anyone would consider this sad.

Because it's not really reliable and breaks in many situations. reddits old nested divs work much better in contrast, and have a layout that matches the semantic situation better.