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I wrote this a couple of years ago and could have sworn I posted it, but the only place I could find it was on my hard drive.
My intention wasn’t to use HTML as a programming language—it’s a markup language. I didn’t realize what I had done until I had done it.
I’ve been programming since 1982, but haven’t done any of what I called “real” programming since they switched from Foxpro to Access at work well over a decade ago; yes, you can build databases with Access but I didn’t consider it “programming”.
The only coding I’ve done in years isn’t what I call “programming” unless there’s Javascript, and there’s very little on either of my sites.
Mike Meyer bought a very old shuffleboard, older than me, for his bar, Felber’s, last year, and came up with a paperish whiteboard for a scoreboard. I was playing with my tablet a couple of weeks ago and realized that I could make a scoreboard in HTML, so I swapped the tablet for the computer and went to work.
The first thing I needed to do was something I’d only done once before, and that was almost two decades ago—use frames.
That first time was a joke I played with an online friend and link buddy in Canada, who was going to medical school. He often complained of the lab rats biting him.
I often ran a contest on my site called the “Ticket to Nowhere”. The winner was a Quake or gaming webmaster who went the longest without updating their site. The winner got a no expense paid ticket to absolutely nowhere.
Dopey Smurf (the fellow’s Quake handle) emailed me and said he was planning to close his site, because graduation was coming up and he feared it would harm his upcoming career.
As soon as I saw the email I had a humorous idea and emailed him back. I would have another contest, and in addition to the ticket to nowhere, the winner (Smurf, of course) would get a box of voracious invisible rats that if let loose would eat a web site. I wrote a container that loaded an unlinked page from my site, which would have a screen-sized GIF of his site. Touching it got the GIF running, which showed the outlines of rats eating their way across the page leaving a dull yellow behind.
Two or three years earlier, Joost Shoor had shut down his Quake site search engine, leaving a dull yellowish screen with a Strogg holding a sign that read “Haste does not lead to success”. What the invisible rats left was identical to Joost’s closed site, except the sign read “Out to lunch”.
If I’d kept that code, the scoreboard would have been a lot easier, as I had some relearning to do. I’d completely forgotten how to do frames. Of course, I’d only used one in that one occasion.
Once I had that figured out, it was a piece of cake. I just made an HTML file and a JPG for each number of each color, with arrows at the bottom to increase or decrease the number, linking to the next and previous. Dirt simple. But when I tested it I realized I needed a way to bring them back to zero, so I added a reset. That done and tested and I rolled a joint and opened a beer.
Later that evening I thought of a big improvement—numbers from one to four at the bottom, with each number linking to the number that value higher than the present number. So I got out the computer and, half drunk and all the way stoned, backed up the working files and tried to do the modifications, but I was nowhere near sober enough. I put it away for the next morning.
It was a lot easier, and the modifications took about an hour or two (there were 44 HTML files to change). I uploaded it to my web site, got out my tablet, and only then realized that I’d written a completely functional program using nothing but HTML 4.1 and JPGs.
The one last thing I need to do is to name the window so I could have a single reset button. I knew how to do it when I gave Smurf the invisible rats, but have forgotten completely how. It might have used javascript, I don’t remember.
I wish I had saved the rats!
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday October 19 2021, @03:25AM (4 children)
I don't do much web development, but I've done a little. Here and there I hear about problems with frames, and/or iframes, but I don't know what the problems are. Maybe they don't scale well on different screen sizes and aspect ratios?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @04:38AM (2 children)
When it gets all the way down to it, frames and iframes don't always behave the way you expect even when they work. You have to be very careful with your targets, be mindful of scaling, keep more state in mind across pages, be mindful of navigation issues, remember that not all user agents support them, and deal with people complaining about bookmarks.
You can also get into the more fundamental arguments of how frames break the entire spirit of HTML and HTTP or how they hinder instead of help design or how they have little to no benefit vs the alternatives with much larger downsides.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday October 19 2021, @05:48AM (1 child)
Thank you. That was mostly general, but I think I understand. So not all browsers render them correctly. And I don't know if I've ever had a problem bookmarking a framed website, but I know I've often intentionally "open frame in new tab" and bookmarked that (because it was the useful part).
I've done almost no css (minor editing) and what little I've looked at it, it looks very messy to me. But I've seen guidelines saying to use css rather than frames, iirc.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19 2021, @08:22AM
Not all browsers render them at all. Try using lynx on mcgrew's page, for example. Or be thankful you don't have a screen reader. Remember that for a long time on the internet, there wasn't really the concept of a "correct" way to render a page. Or is it that there wasn't a "wrong" way? ;)
CSS is definitely more powerful (it is Turing complete in the right circumstances) and I think CSS+iframes makes more sense in most circumstances. But doing so is definitely more complicated because you can quickly GIGO when you lose sight of the cascading algorithm, element inheritance, or selector specificity. Like any programming language, once you understand the abstract machine's rules, it becomes much easier and you can then focus on the actual keywords and library. Usually I recommend the MDN's materials to learn it or to start with CSS 1 before moving on to CSS 2.1 and 3. The MDN allows you to mostly focus on one concept at time, building on previous knowledge. And the other approach benefits in a similar way because the rules being mostly the same (most superset/subset) from one version to the next.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 19 2021, @01:28PM
There are a lot of problems with frames. One was with full screen frames like I used for Dopey Smurf's invisible rats. They often break the back button.
Frames were used a lot in the '90s. "Kneel Harriot" used them for a side panel like many sites, only he did it as a joke; none of the links were real. But he was as much a fan of my site as I was as his, and he once made a real link to my site from that frame. If you clicked my link than his from my site over and over it was like pointing a camera at its monitor.
Frames and tables are two things that should only be used as a last resort, and after understanding the problems they can cause.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience