An old CSS hack

Community Off Topic
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html {
	min-height:100%;
	margin-bottom:1px;
}

This is an old CSS hack to defeat the vertical scroll bar and get it out of view. In the wild hacks were on the table, then. Is it meaningful or due any review what the early years were like?

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What was the exact use case of that?
I can’t think of having had a horizontal scrollbar for content not exceeding the viewport height, given I reset the browser default padding and margin – what I always do.
I develop on a Mac though – Macs don’t show the scrollbars unless you scroll. So it’s easy to miss them (but I usually test on Windows at the end of a project, though).

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I can no longer remember if it was just for FF or just for IE, but the use case was for pages that didn’t fill the window when it was at full height. It has been nearly twenty years since hacks were a thing. In those days we put a lot of work into eking out as much screen real estate as possible, given there were not a lot of window sizes in the day.

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I don’t remember specific hacks – just using these browser hacks:

<!--[if IE 6]>
    <style>...</style>
  <![endif]-->

Startet with CSS when IE6 was still used by a relevant amount of people. :fearful:

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Yeah, I remember having to use conditional comments (an MS invention) and was so happy when IE bit the dust. Mind, it was as I was on my way out, so we could say I went out with IE. People have it so good now.

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Consider that there may have been behavior concerns, as well…

<script>..</script>

Just mention, ‘IE’, and it immediately implies extra baggage. JS behavior was buggy all the way along. While I spent years enjoying page views in FF, I had no idea that nobody was seeing in IE what I was seeing. Seems they slipped in an update that changed how ‘location’ would behave, going forward. The site is long gone but I still remember my own shock at how easy it was to be uninformed about what your own site is doing. The site was not broken, it just did not have a feature that I had all along assumed was there for everyone. It did work at one time in IE, until MS took it away, for some reason. I’ll never know why because by the time I did know, it didn’t matter. Let this be a lesson to everyone.

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For the record, this is the site in question, which is thankfully archived by our ‘WayBackMachine’ friends…

Wainwright & District Family and Community Services Home Page

The calendar was largely PHP driven, meaning served from the server in CURRENT form with expired date items removed, or at least their links. It’s a long time ago. The ‘location’ variable may have been written into script in the request document, meant to capture something on the client, I don’t remember. All I know is that IE users were missing a very important feature for who knows how long, and nobody would have noticed it ever existed. Sheesh. Talk about embarrassment that nobody had to see but me. It’s bad enough, believe it.