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by cutler 18 days ago
Responsive design out of the box? Were you actually there? Back in 2000 you could make a career out of scripting browser polyfills or "DHTML".
3 comments

Quite. Or differences in the box-model, appending weird symbols to CSS to target specific browsers, adding zoom:1, praying you didn’t have to support IE6….
That doesn't seem relevant to responsive design? HTML and CSS are definitely responsive out of the box, but OTOH I remember how many designers of that era thought responsiveness was a bug and asked devs to add width:920px to body...
CSS, especially the box model, was not consistent across browsers.
True. Does not prevent the design from being responsive. Even with no CSS at all a design is responsive unless you specifically choose to break that
Right but how would you even display a vertical menu back then? `float: left` was rather bad, so you went back to using tables[0]. Good luck making these responsive.

[0]: and to using dozens of images sliced to fit your table cells, for that cool hover effect as well as round corners. :-)

Why would documents have menus? Menus are for applications.

And there was nothing wrong with tables for layout, especially back then when the alternatives were very brittle.

> Why would documents have menus? Menus are for applications.

s/menu/navigation

> And there was nothing wrong with tables for layout, especially back then when the alternatives were very brittle.

I never said there was anything wrong with tables. OP said there was nothing preventing the design from being responsive, to which I responded yes, there was, at least in a lot of cases.

(Responsiveness was also mostly irrelevant back then because smartphones were not a thing yet.)

The idea that 00s websites were responsive is laughable. Websites used to tell you they are designed for resolutions 1024x768 and above, because they hardcoded the size and position and everything and the moment you sizes your browser window down a horizontal scroll bar appears, or worse. Say what you want about modern web practices but responsibility is only getting better, not worse.