Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asolove | Hacker News Reader

The year is 1996. Microsoft's homepage has a menu bar that expands when you move your mouse over it. I am determined to figure out how this works.

At the time, IE has a "view source" button, but it's not very platform aware. You get a Notepad doc. The server is running Unix with files where lines break on "\n" and I'm on Windows, which needs "\r", so the source is one single long line of html.

I look through the source thoroughly: what is in their html that I don't know about that lets them make things move around? All the html tags are ones I know. All the content is text I can see on the page.

The only mysterious bit is these " "s. I've never seen those before and don't know what they are. They appear on sites with moving menus. They must be related.

(For six months, I believed the effect of dhtml was achieved through magic incantations of what turned out to be html entities. A bit later I found WebMonkey tutorials and this turned into a whole career.)

View source was my launchpad.

Minimizers and compilers are great, but I so miss reading through the well manicured and maintained source of a well-designed site.

I wish we could have gone with a type of compression that allowed us to keep the original source formatting for perusing production code, and ideally keep the expectation that others from around the world will be reading our code.

I imagine it had a lot to do with how quickly this thing has progressed early on. It's definitely a big part of my own origin story in this industry.

When Adobe bought Macromedia, my hope was for the flash format to largely become a Zip file with SVG, JS and other assets as a package.

MS Silverlight was close, but too late as flash died and people stopped installing browser plugins.

Right there with you. I was a huge fan of AS3 and build some great client projects with it. When using types, it very closely resemble Typescript in a lot of ways. I was hoping for open standards and eventual direct browser integration.

Same here! What a magical and empowering feeling to just see how a website works, edit it, and see the changes immediately. A year later I was paid to make my first website and 28 years later I'm still working as a full stack web developer. That one discovery in a toolbar led to a career and changed the course of my life. It's sad that that type of discoverability is largely gone.

I want to know what was actually causing the moving menus! I wasn't around coding at the time, so I'm going to guess that the moving menus were actually caused by a `<script>` tag (maybe one pointing at an external JS file?). Did you ever find out the reason? Is my guess correct?

Yeah, it was 100% a script tag. At the time, I didn't understand that you could pull in code from another URL and have it impact the current page. I thought "view source" was everything impacting the page.

Similar experience wanting to replace images on mouse over. Bought "JavaScript Bible" at Barnes & Noble, read it that weekend and never stopped learning.

Wow, WebMonkey....that brings back memories.

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