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Comment by ftio | Hacker News Reader

That hasn’t always been true!

I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create this effect.

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I dunno, I look back on the <table>-based layout days with fondness, probably because I was young and the Web was nothing but rolling green fields and endless potential. I didn't see the limitations, only the opportunities for inventiveness. I'll never feel the same satisfaction as I did when those first few website designs came together.

I feel like responsive websites killed that magic, because now it's way too complicated to make interesting designs.

Indeed, CSS border-radius was introduced around year 2010. I was both browsing the web and writing pages before that time. https://caniuse.com/?search=border-radius , https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/border-radi...

See also the old sliding doors article breathlessly making rounded tabs:

https://alistapart.com/article/slidingdoors/

A list apart was my go to resource for a long time. Css zen garden was great

In games you had to do this 9 piece slice, one slice for each of the 4 corners, all 4 straight sides that can be repeated as a pattern and the middle background piece

Nine-patch image scaling[0] is still a thing, and is only orthogonally related to setting a border radius (it's a hell of lot more versatile than that).

0: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/9SliceSprites.html

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