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Shoutout to the Web Ring that finally got me to quit using spacer GIFs
I ran a fan page for the band Weezer out of my parents' house in 1997 with three nested tables and about 40 transparent spacer GIFs holding the whole thing together. Then I joined a web ring and saw how clean the other sites looked, all because they just used cellpadding and width percentages instead. Was I the only one who wasted hours slicing tiny clear images to push text around?
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richard_mason1mo ago
We all had that moment of shame seeing a site that just used a table width="100%" and somehow looked better than our masterpiece. Forty spacer GIFs is honestly impressive though, that's like an entire pixel art project you were maintaining by hand. I had one called blank.gif saved in like six different folders because I kept losing track of where it lived. The real kicker is those 1x1 gifs probably weighed more combined than the actual content did. Web rings were basically the original design review, you'd click through and either feel proud or feel like burning your whole site down.
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