A lifetime of dirty browser hacks is suddenly flooding back. Kids these days will never appreciate what we had to go through to make a page render anywhere near consistently in different browsers.
Tricks like crafting css that only some browsers could parse.
height/**/: 300px;
Or the insane sliding doors technique we used to get rounded corners.
The fact that select inputs were rendered by the OS so you had to find them all and hide them when you opened a modal so they didn’t sit on top of your content.
The desire to support custom files that drive us into swapping all the text for blocks of Flash after the page loaded.
It was almost better than the 20 level deep nested table layouts full of shims we had to do.
The most memorable hack was the voice-family hack for IE 5.5 IIRC. I remember reading about it and how the hack was so nice as to reset the voice-family afterwards. To date I still don't think voice-family is really supported anywhere; really shows how optimistic CSS was at that time.
You didn’t have to hide selects, you just (just, hah!) had to dynamically generate an empty iframe and shim it one z-level below your absolutely positioned div.
Tricks like crafting css that only some browsers could parse.
Or the insane sliding doors technique we used to get rounded corners.https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/
The mystery script we included to get alpha support in images.
https://git.twinhelix.com/cgit/iepngfix/tree/iepngfix.htc
The fact that select inputs were rendered by the OS so you had to find them all and hide them when you opened a modal so they didn’t sit on top of your content.
The desire to support custom files that drive us into swapping all the text for blocks of Flash after the page loaded.
It was almost better than the 20 level deep nested table layouts full of shims we had to do.