alt Hacker NewsAs someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp, iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.
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Absolutely. I also hand-edited HTML (and XHTML and CGI scripts and Java applets) back in those days and the majority of web pages were no more than a few hundred lines of code long. Regular notepad.exe was absolutely fine at home, and I did a lot of editing server-side in vi. It was a simpler time....
The technology limitations is really what is missing. Most personal pages had zero CSS and CSS itself was extremely primitive. JS was even more rare and minimal. Most pages used font tags and table layout, this was far before semantic web. Most people stuck to the “web safe” 256 colors which is why the color schemes were so distinctive, and even then, most sites used the “named” browser colors like “red” or “green” rather than hex colors. Horizontal rules dominated the land unless you were in-the-know about invisible pixel gifs for layout, always abusing tables. Most importantly it you didn’t target internet explorer 6 at the most (and stuck a little banner “best viewed on X” then it wasn’t a very deep site anyways!
Bonus points for side navigation bars that were an iframe so you didn’t have to copy paste the same sidebar code across your multiple pages.
Wasn't geocities before iframes? Think you needed framesets in those days!
I think the thing these "old internet revivals" miss is sites looked the way they did because they were outsider-art. I don't think they have to reuse precisely the same layout tools, but non-developers butting heads with those tools was a big factor in why personal sites looked that way. The whole look of "old internet" is a modern concept that's a bit flanderized [0] now.
Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization
[1] https://neocities.org/