10 Weird HTML Hacks That Shaped the Internet

Re:10 Weird HTML Hacks That Shaped the Internet by codingdave on Friday December 01, 2023 @08:33AM (#38486437)

Same - I recall using it heavily in 99. But that was just on one internal app. I admit that I didn't really predict the SPA thing until Google maps came out and really showed how far it could be taken.

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Re:10 Weird HTML Hacks That Shaped the Internet by sbarre on Friday December 01, 2023 @11:04AM (#38488258)

I worked for an ISP in the late 90s and we built a call center app using IE6, SSI, XMLHttp and also IE's built in CSS classes that matched the Windows colours to essentially have a UI that looked and felt like a Windows 95 app..

It was completely unnecessary (at least the look and feel part) but the ability to load in new information into the UI without a full refresh was great.

At the time this was running on Apache 1.1 via Perl CGIs and backed by an mSQL database (that was single-threaded!) so we wanted to minimize complex SQL queries as much as possible..

We eventually moved to a system that would batch pre-render customer details and call history to static HTML overnight when our call center was closed, to reduce the startup time of bringing up a customer's info when the agent had them on the phone. Then for that day we'd use XMLHttp to dynamically append new information from the DB (using a limit statement) and then re-build the static files the next night etc..

In hindsight, we did some creative problem solving for a bunch of self-taught 20-year-olds in the 90s.

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