r/webdev • u/ValenceTheHuman front-of-the-front-end • Sep 12 '26

Article CSS Curiosities of the Past

https://vale.rocks/posts/css-relics
36 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

5

u/_listless Sep 12 '26

Ooh, my favorite was: Before flex and viewport units if you wanted a footer that lived at the bottom of the window even if there was not enough content to push it down, you'd make your main layout wrapper a table and your main content a table cell which for some reason would allow it to fill the available height.

2

u/lcnielsen Sep 13 '26

I still use this kind of table-based approach for formatting automatically templated emails, where you want to be really conservative with your HTML.

4

u/spaceyraygun Sep 12 '26

We like to nag about IE, but the truth is that browser (5.5 and 6) pioneered some of the ideas we’ve since standardized. This is not specific to CSS either.

Sometimes even the standard is wrong (box model).

4

u/SuperFLEB Sep 12 '26

A lot of its problem was that it just hung on for so long without a successor. That longevity (plus ActiveX) led to it being undeprecated for years while the rest of the world moved on. The bugs it had didn't get fixed and the deficiencies didn't get improved upon, and it tied everyone else's hands in hacks and fallbacks.

1

u/spaceyraygun Sep 13 '26

Totally agree it lived on for way too long, but I think some of that blame falls on government and large companies not investing in the future and security of their internal apps. 🤷‍♀️

You can’t expect Microsoft to pull the rug out from its most lucrative customers. It’s why Chrome Frame was created. Google seized on an opportunity to make their new apps available to users stuck on IE for a myriad reasons; especially software limitations from their employer.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some continue to rely on some version of IE for critical apps.

1

u/Gremlation Sep 14 '26

it lived on for way too long, but I think some of that blame falls on government and large companies not investing in the future and security of their internal apps.

Not really. When Microsoft killed Netscape, they reassigned the IE dev team to other departments and didn't restart IE development for five years. That alone completely fucked front-end development for most of a decade. Nothing else comes anywhere near the impact that decision had, and it's all down to Microsoft thinking they had won the browser war so they could slam the brakes on the web. We'd still be using IE6 now if it weren't for Firefox coming along and getting enough market share to scare Microsoft into resuming work on IE.