Craft - May 2023

The 1x1 spacer GIF, and other sins

I have built layouts with framesets, with nested tables, with a transparent one-pixel GIF stretched to whatever width the design demanded. None of it was good. All of it shipped, and worked, and paid. That tension has never really left the job.

The through-line from 1997 to now is not the tools, which keep changing, but the constraints, which do not. You always have less bandwidth, less certainty about the viewport, and less of the user's patience than you would like. Every era invents a new way to pretend otherwise.

The tools got honest

Flexbox and grid did something the spacer GIF never could: they described intent instead of faking a result. You say "these share the space" rather than "put a 17-pixel gap here and pray". The layout survives a resize because it was never lying about what it meant.

The old habits still teach something, though. Every one of those hacks existed because a real constraint was in the way, and the fix was to be honest about the constraint rather than paper over it. That part of the job has not aged a day.

All writing - CV