Spent a whole afternoon in 1999 rebuilding a GeoCities page because the guestbook script broke

Turned out the issue was a missing closing bracket on a font tag, and my neighbor's kid spotted it in about 30 seconds while I'd been staring at the code for hours, anyone else lose a day to something that dumb back then?

2 comments

2 Comments

charles_green4h ago

Man, that takes me back. I spent two whole days once trying to fix a marquee tag that wouldn't scroll right. Turned out I had the direction set to "up" instead of "left" and just never noticed because I was too busy tweaking the background color. The thing that kills me is how simple these problems were. You'd have this massive page with all these animated gifs and sparkly dividers, but one missing bracket would bring the whole thing crashing down. And nobody had a clue back then, you just had to stare at the code until your eyes bled or find a friend who knew what a closing tag was.

jason56210m ago

Disagree hard, every modern framework has way more hidden traps than a missing bracket ever did.