LOL wow that reminds me of the good old internet :D |
It's quite fun and nostalgic to use.
But it's also important to remember that those 13-year olds are the ones who are building the internet now and some of them shaped the way it is now, not only big IT companies.
It was a golden age when the web was a relatively small place where everybody was just writing in a niche area about what they liked, and style and fashion didn't matter as much.
I had a sort of punkish/DYI touch to it, don't you think?
These kids built stuff in their parents' basements and made a life of their own and put the internet to good use. In blindingly ugly bright colors... :)
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In just think, in the near future, most sites will be Facebook pages, extensions thereof, or exist because of FB life support (social connections, ads, apps) ...ugh. |
Back then the tools were much more limited. We didn't have CSS to style our page as we wanted.
Even the ability to have a background image behind the text of the page was quite a recent addition to our browsers, so it's not surprising that people over-used it. Sometimes with a new tool you need to push it past its reasonable limits, in order to discover what the limits really are.
Also back then there were lots of 16-color displays still around. Most of the others were 256-color, and the colors were palette-driven rather than standardised. So it's not surprising that people made heavy use of the basic 16-color set, even though many of the colors were too bright for use on a text-based page.
Our images tended to be garish too, because although the PNG format had been specified by then it wasn't widely supported, so we used GIF with its limit of 256 colors per image.
The only way we could reliably draw a horizontal line on a page was with the HR tag, so it's not surprising that HR was heavily over-used. |
As a nostalgia kick, does anyone still have any of their pages from the Geocities era online? Not necessarily pages that were hosted at Geocities, but pages from say 1998.
I found a few of mine from 1998. This one has the giveaway table layout and flat colors: http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013758/http://eiffel.tm/
This one is much more plain, but with some HRs and a GIF graphic. The source shows how simple HTML used to be: no references to favicons, no stylesheets, no scripts, etc. Just the text and a little markup: http://eiffelzone.com/d/gotcha/index.htm |
Internet Archive has my old design too, including the frameset version :-). My website was first launched on a 'free' domain in 2004, also can still be seen in the Internet Archive. |
Tony, those are great! The epitome of 1998, blink tags and all. |
Cyan 3D imagery and a left-hand navigation frame... Tony, we had similar taste in web design back then!
> As a nostalgia kick, does anyone still have any of their pages > from the Geocities era online? Not necessarily pages that > were hosted at Geocities, but pages from say 1998.
Wish I'd have kept mine, at Geocities in 1997. The problem is not so much that I didn't make backups, the problem is that the backup on CD (or was it disk?) got lost or thrown away somewhere/ somewhen. |
Hate to be a killjoy (again), but even then, in proto-web age, I had the prescience of producing timeless websites. Such that, had they been allowed to survive on other people's servers, they would have withstood the tooth of time. A typical text-only [and, moreover, TTY-monospaced/ Lynx-friendly] site is this now sadly web-archived "Informal profiles of recumbent / bike riders" once at IHPVA.org – be prepared to wait for the extremely slow server response at times:
http://web.archive.org/web/20001005183827/www.ihpva.org/HPVpeople/readme.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20001005172518/www.ihpva.org/HPVpeople/Z-A.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20001023150758/www.ihpva.org/HPVpeople/A-Z-lynx.html
(and I am especially proud of this "pre-filled" mail-update form, complete with metric years, which has been "cloned" a number of times later.... imitation being the sincerest form of flattery ;-))
http://web.archive.org/web/20001026033653/www.ihpva.org/HPVpeople/update.html |
OMG that is some funny stuff! :) |
#3 "Thou shall not call yer OMG in vain." |
13 year old? COMPANIES used Geocities .. and I cannot imagine that their CEO was 13 y/o... |