I really appreciate that someone's job (or at least part of it) was to "prototype concepts that would add some interactive sparkle to the site". Working on a larger team, we generally add this kind of interaction at the start of a project or during redesign. There are larger prototypes, of course. But very rarely is someone designated to independently go out and just find small ways of making the experience just a bit nicer for the users, and build that; and I really like that idea.
It is interesting to think about the socio-technical reasons to make a serverside roundtrip for each keypress. Another approach might be to load up the dictionary client-side and use javascript to swap letterforms in various pre-determined locations. Presumably using browser-text with a transparent background wouldn't sufficiently simulate what the real product looked like.
Basically, it was easier. Or even... barely even possible to do what you describe. Maybe you could, but it would have been nightmarish whack-a-mole, and a good chance that the next update to any given browser would break it completely.
In ‘05, you had IE6, plenty of folks still on IE5, IE5 for Mac was still in use, safari was 2.0, respectable but still a minority browser, and Firefox was on 1.0. Plenty of folks were still on Netscape navigator, which by that point was actively decomposing.
IE6 was what you built for, as it was the majority browser by a country mile. Transparency was hit and miss. Alpha PNGs just weren’t supported, you had to hack them in via JS.
Most websites were laid out using <table>. Using a <div> was new and exotic.
Oh, and you could only do custom fonts using… flash. sIFR, if you want to delve into the hell that was web dev back then. Most folks would just end up with TNR. Transparency on sIFR you could only achieve by replicating your background into the SWF, and good luck getting it to line up.
So. Support an absolute soup of edge cases across a bunch of different browser engines, and deal with “IT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE IT DID ON THE WEBPAGE” from customers, or just do it server side.
Also, it was perfectly acceptable to wait for a website to load - 50% of the U.S. was still on dialup, and “broadband” was commonly 512k.
Lots of things were different on the front end back then:
- IE was an albatross around every web developers neck
- Even better browsers like Firefox and Safari had tons of inconsistencies
- jQuery and Prototype weren't around yet
- CSS is not remotely close to what it is today
Honestly, placing text over an image was a lofty task back then. We used to use lots of images with text as part of the image. Text images and table layouts were two of the main ways to get around all those cross-browser issues.
In ‘05, you had IE6, plenty of folks still on IE5, IE5 for Mac was still in use, safari was 2.0, respectable but still a minority browser, and Firefox was on 1.0. Plenty of folks were still on Netscape navigator, which by that point was actively decomposing.
IE6 was what you built for, as it was the majority browser by a country mile. Transparency was hit and miss. Alpha PNGs just weren’t supported, you had to hack them in via JS.
Most websites were laid out using <table>. Using a <div> was new and exotic.
Oh, and you could only do custom fonts using… flash. sIFR, if you want to delve into the hell that was web dev back then. Most folks would just end up with TNR. Transparency on sIFR you could only achieve by replicating your background into the SWF, and good luck getting it to line up.
So. Support an absolute soup of edge cases across a bunch of different browser engines, and deal with “IT LOOKS NOTHING LIKE IT DID ON THE WEBPAGE” from customers, or just do it server side.
Also, it was perfectly acceptable to wait for a website to load - 50% of the U.S. was still on dialup, and “broadband” was commonly 512k.
- IE was an albatross around every web developers neck - Even better browsers like Firefox and Safari had tons of inconsistencies - jQuery and Prototype weren't around yet - CSS is not remotely close to what it is today
Honestly, placing text over an image was a lofty task back then. We used to use lots of images with text as part of the image. Text images and table layouts were two of the main ways to get around all those cross-browser issues.