Chapter Two: Designing and Building with Standards

How did designers and developers produce sites before web standards were created and before browsers supported them? Any which way they could. Consider the late Suck.com, one of the web’s earliest and wittiest independent periodicals [2.1]. Suck possessed a sharp writing style and had the smarts to slap its daily content right on the front page, where readers couldn’t miss it. It sounds obvious today, when everyone and their brother has a blog featuring continually updated front-page stories, but in the mid-1990s when Suck debuted, most sites buried their content behind splash screens, welcome pages, mission statements, and confusing “Table of Contents” pages.

2.1. Suck didn’t. A decidedly ...

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