Today’s submission is a little bit different. Kevin sends us some code where the real WTF is simply that… it still is in use somewhere. By the standards of its era, I’d actually say that the code is almost good. This is more of a little trip down memory lane, about the way web development used to work.
In 2019, if you want to have a sidebar full of links which allow users to click, and have a portion of the page update while not refreshing the whole page, you probably write a component in the UI framework of your choice. In 1999, you used frames. Honestly, by 1999, frames were already on the way out (he says, despite maintaining a number of frames-based applications well into the early 2010s), but for a brief period in web development history, they were absolutely all the rage.