Theme 1 – Early‑web browser limitations forced server‑side solutions
- “Transparency was hit and miss. Alpha PNGs just weren’t supported, you had to hack them in via JS.” – madaxe_again
- “IE was an albatross around every web developers neck… CSS is not remotely close to what it is today.” – ssharp
- “You could only do custom fonts using… flash… Most folks would just end up with TNR.” – madaxe_again
Theme 2 – Network constraints made per‑keypress roundtrips acceptable
- “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.” – madaxe_again
- “Even on a 56k modem, it might take less than 1 second to load each image.” – adrianmonk
- “The demo page's JS… just updates the img src whenever the text changes… the browser is smart enough to know that, by the time it would have started the download, the resource no longer exists in the page.” – adrianmonk
Theme 3 – Nostalgic appreciation for the design ‘sparkle’ and deliberate delight
- “I really appreciate that someone's job … was to 'prototype concepts that would add some interactive sparkle to the site'.” – georgecalm
- “It’s nice that it still seems like their design and UX teams have latitude to do things like this… folding animation on the Duo.” – lukeify
- “Add customer delight to the product pages; make no mistakes.” – jasongill