Lev Lazinskiy

The 90's Web

I remember going to the Roselawn Library in Cincinnati, OH when I was around 8 years old and signing up to get 30 minutes on the internet. This would have been around 1998. I remember going to a site that I think was called snap.com (which I cannot seem to find anymore) where you could play a flash game where you were able to punch Bill Clinton. The computer ran Windows 95 and had a blazing fast DSL connection (at least 200k). The web was so simple back then. I like to go on the wayback machine sometimes and just browse random sites in the 90s. You can come up with some pretty interesting things doing that. My favorite thing to do is look at modern companies old website. Google for instance, 500B dollar company started off looking like this.

The point of all this is that I did throwback to the 90s on the blog because I could get my columns to line up in the main page. So instead of using CSS, I put it in a table. This worked flawlessly. However it is a horrible practice, I felt guilty by doing it, and ultimately it made the mobile experience awful when viewing this site because the columns were smushed together. I fixed this by creating a wrapper div, and then two small floating divs. I also used media queries to make this blog more readable on mobile devices. The SCSS ( I am using Jekyll ) for this is:

.post {
    padding-bottom: 10px;

    .post-date {
        width: 15%;
        float: left;
    }


    .post-body {
        width: 90%;
    }
}

It was fun to use tables for this, because it reminded me of my early days as a junior web master. But, I worry that people will adopt this practice so I quickly got rid of it here.