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Comment by t1234s | Hacker News Reader

Having been building websites since the mid 90's, I laugh at terms like "HTML-first website"

I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the Flash animation splash pages I was forced to sit through before being able to look up hours of operation.

I did some work for a company that spent nearly a grand on a Flash animation for their title page of a red bouncing ball that would bounce from right to left along the letters of the word "Yipee" (yeah totally not ripping off Yahoo! were they?) until it landed in the crook of the Y, where it would spread down the middle - the finished logo had the Y made out of blue, yellow, and red stripes.

Every single person I showed it to including my then-70-something mother said "that just looks like menstrual bleeding".

Every single person said that.

They still went with it. Conversion rate? Dunno, never got numbers high enough to test the script.

As a teenager I remember going to a website for... a city, I think? And their 'sidebar' was a Java applet that did nothing but provide links for you to click with on-hover effects. The page used frames; the applet was in the left-side frame and the content was in the main frame on the right.

The applet took 30 seconds to load. Once it loaded, it showed five buttons to click to get to different sections of the site. When you clicked on one, instead of changing the content frame, it sent you to an entirely new frameset. This, of course, caused the sidebar to take another 30 seconds to load. Hitting the back button did the same thing.

Meanwhile, I knew someone whose friend made a little applet that he showed me; it was a Java applet that you could provide an image URL for and it would load the image and then, below the image, show a rippling effect as though you were looking at something on the shore of a rippling lake. This applet took less than a second to load and ran incredibly smoothly.

Java was a curse, not because Java was bad but because Java applets were written badly and used badly simply because they were neat.

Every language can say that bad developers write bad code with it while good developers write good code with it.

I would like to say the early interweb was just a learning experience, but today's interweb hasn't learned any of the lessons. It's just changed which language the lesson is being relearned

A lot of these tools, like React, are designed to embrace, extend extinguish the web. Why Microslop and Zuckerberg spend millions of dollars of dark PR claiming anyone who doesn't like React doesn't know what's going on is because it makes the web worse and less useful, which means you spend more time talking to Co-Pilot or bots on Facebook.

You forgot to mention that the Java applet doesn't have antialiasing, so the entire menu looks like crap.

It's like chai tea.

explain?

> Chai, a word for tea in numerous languages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai

"Chai" means "tea", so "Chai Tea" is "Tea Tea".

"ATM" means "Automatic Teller Machine", so "ATM Machine" is "Automatic Teller Machine Machine".

Both are mentioned in the animated movie "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse".

PIN number

Town names too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montebello_della_Battaglia

Not in the Wikipedia page (but check the Italian version): it started as "Mons Belli" (Mount of the Battle) because of a battle fought by the Romans a few years before the Hannibal campaign. Then the original meaning was lost and it gained another "of battle" in the 1800s. Mount of the Battle of the Battle. Hopefully there won't be another one to add.

Lake Tahoe (Lake Big Lake). River Avon (River River). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_nam...

Actually, in English, Chai does not mean tea, it means a specific flavor of tea. If you don't believe me, try ordering some Earl Grey Chai, see what happens.

Sure, but "chai tea" is still redundant. I have never used that term and ordered chai in many places without confusion.

it's redundant at a place that serves chai, but it isn't redundant at a place that does not serve chai, because you're skipping the "what is chai" question from whoever you're querying.

It's redundant in the same way Earl Grey tea is redundant, though.

If your server is Indian, they'll likely react positively, and get you what you want.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/england+chai+london/

Except places are now offering Chai Latte Coffee so if you don't specifically order Chai Tea Latte, you could get some thing totally different than expected. I learned this the hard way.

ATM Machine

The La Brea Tar Pits => The the tar tar pits

My favorite from Southern California.

OK, I have to admit, that one I didn't know.

It's only a matter of time until someone posts "Torpenhow Hill" -- which does not exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpenhow_Hill

All from the Department of Redundancy Department.

The Sahara desert. It's not only repetitive but it repeats itself too as well.

These gems are brought to you by the department of redundancy department.

Naan bread

  - shrimp scampi
  - Old Adage
  - chai tea
  - Naan Bread
  - Rio Grande River
  - Lake Tahoe
  - PIN/ VIN number
  - ATM machine
  - GPS system
  - Panini sandwich

- Hill Hill Hill (Hill):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo

With au jus.

Reminds me of “pre-jit”

ie "aot"?

I thought this article was missing a (1999) in the title.

Same, and it has certainly made me realize that I am now officially entering my "old man yelling at cloud" phase of my life, and I'm "only" 38!

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