Someone once told me, “you will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations nostalgia and think it’s still shit because you are too old for that to have been your childhood”.
The jQuery era is something I’d never want to go back to. Not because jQuery was bad, but because the basic DOM api was so poor, JavaScript was much more limited and incoherent, and webpages made anything outside of text input difficult (e.g. no voice, no gestures).
In this case I could alter that to: "You will know what nostalgia truly is, when you see a younger generations representation of nostalgia and you can point out all the anachronisms in it."
Netscape 3 and websites that looked like that: 1996
In 2006, I was reading [HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible](https://www.amazon.com/HTML-XHTML-CSS-Bible-3rd/dp/076455739...), which was new-ish at the time and using Netscape as a daily browser, building sites using GeoCities. There were precursors to jQuery (cssQuery, for instance) that made it possible to do some things that Flash was too heavy for but you couldn't do in pure CSS.
And you bet your ass we were still building flashy, wild sorts of sites like that. Still do! Absolutely go check out stuff like Neocities.
Huh. When I read that I assumed Blink referred to the <blink> tag, but reading again you might actually be right that it means Google's browser engine. Truly anachronistic indeed.
Sprinkling a little jQuery in a page to add interactive menus and AJAXify some form submissions was quite nice.
What I don't miss from the jQuery times is how painfully limited CSS was, e.g. to add rounded corners to an element (e.g. a button) required something like 11 nested elements (4 corners + 4 edges + 3 rows to contain them). The corners themselves needed image files: to support different background colours you could either use GIFs with transparent backgrounds, but they appeared "jagged" due to aliasing; you could use PNGs which support an whole alpha channel, but lose IE support; or you could create a bunch of different versions for each occasion.
I remember when web pages looked like that... and it was AFTER I started making websites. I was scrolling through this page thinking "this stuff is too new, look at all these advanced features it's using". Flaming text? That's like 1999, practically cutting-edge! hahah :)
The jQuery era is something I’d never want to go back to. Not because jQuery was bad, but because the basic DOM api was so poor, JavaScript was much more limited and incoherent, and webpages made anything outside of text input difficult (e.g. no voice, no gestures).