👉 Okay, let’s tackle this… fascinatingly weird thing called, brace yourselves...
“Callbacks.inc."
. 10 syllables of internet weirdness that honestly sounds a little like the title for a rejected Philip Glass opera about regret and forgotten takeout reheats.
Basically—and I'm distilling it down as aggressively as I possibly can—a "Callbacks.inc." is essentially a tiny, almost ridiculously specific, piece of pre-scripted, often aggressively outdated, HTML (the stuff that
used to
build websites!) you shove into your project. Think of it like a digital, stubborn houseguest who insists on playing the same 90's AOL anthem at every conceivable juncture.
Here’s what actually happened, and this is where things get wonderfully unsettling: Originally, early versions of JavaScript were… not great. There was no fancy "Webpack.!" No pretty package managers. Just...stuff you slapped in yourself. To help with that, there was a thing called the, uh, 2006 Yearly Event Archive. (I'm kidding, I’s probably not what it actually was but let's go along with this for now). This archive contained small snippets of old-as-dirt HTML and Javascript to make your site... shinier or whatever!
The filename "Callbacks.inc."? It came from the idea that these snippets were, in fact, a callback – a reminder of things you’d already