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A comment on MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today. Parent comment

Re:MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today by reconnecting on Saturday July 12, 2025 @03:55PM (#44544656)
I'm jealous of your memory capabilities, and I certainly remember that at some point it was nearly impossible to make website looks in similar way in Netscape and IE.

At the end, there was something like acceptable variation in page view for different browsers.

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Re:MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today by mr_toad on Saturday July 12, 2025 @04:51PM (#44545059)
The rendering differences were at least as much IE’s fault as Netscapes. It took several versions before IE was (mostly) standards compliant.
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Re:MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today by giantrobot on Saturday July 12, 2025 @05:55PM (#44545524)
You're not wrong. IE seemed very much designed around the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish concept. It made it incredibly difficult to write cross-browser CSS.
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Re:MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today by giantrobot on Saturday July 12, 2025 @05:02PM (#44545143)
> I'm jealous of your memory capabilities,

Thanks. Learning web development back then left some deep scars and lasting lessons. I can no longer imagine all the other stuff I haven't retained because I remember stupid browser quirks from nearly three decades ago.

Getting many designs working consistently between IE and Netscape was impossible. The 640px wide left-aligned table layout was popular for years because it was the easiest common denominator that looked acceptable in both browsers.

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Re:MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today by reconnecting on Saturday July 12, 2025 @06:50PM (#44545882)
When back to this time the web was mostly a pain, especially for developers, there was also some magic.

Take for example VRML, particularly VRML 2.0. I don't remember the software name, but there was a chat system within a virtual world, perhaps running in a browser (1).

1. https://csdl-images.ieeecomputer.org/mags/cg/1999/02/figures...

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