Ten Years Ago in ALA: Footers and Image Galleries

One decade ago this week, A List Apart released Issue 170. The two articles published that week both discussed combining CSS, JavaScript, and markup to build user interface features we wouldn’t think twice about placing on a site today.

Exploring Footers by Bobby Van Der Sluis

One of the difficulties in prying tables-for-layout from the hands of web standards skeptics was offering a compelling way to handle heights and vertical positioning. In addition to a variety of CSS hacks, JavaScript gets involved here to stick a footer to the bottom of the window. The same code is recommended for vertically centering an element, so it might still be useful today.

JavaScript Image Gallery by Jeremy Keith

This JavaScript, taken as-is, could be a perfectly reasonable foundation for something like a series of product photos even now. These days, to really bowl an audience over with something like this, we’d have to do it all in CSS. It’s interesting that switching to newer techniques like querySelector and data attributes probably wouldn’t change the number of lines of code here, though it’s probably safe now to drop the check for getElementById.