evacide: What you need to understand about the World Wide Web in 1994, is that it was incredibly ugly: www.fastcompany.com/91140068/how...

What you need to understand about the World Wide Web in 1994, is that it was incredibly ugly: www.fastcompany.com/91140068/how...

What the internet looked like in 1994, according to 15 webpages born that year - Fast Companywww.fastcompany.com Looking back at the Web when it first entered the mainstream shows a world far different from today's cyber wastelands.

Pre-CSS! Your font choices were serif and sans serif. There were 215 cross-platform web-safe colors. Small image size was more important than quality, since almost everyone was on dial-up.

Tables for layout

1994 was pre-tables, as the screencaps make fairly clear. (TABLE came with Netscape 1.1 in earlyish 1995). Layout in 1994 was basically UL / LI with some creative use of images. Imagemaps for navigation.

I built corporate websites in mid-1995 with UL / LI and (I think) background images because IE didn’t have table support until late ‘95, and with separate sites for Netscape and IE because they spaced LI differently.

I remember when that web in the article was amazing those of us who were there pre-websites. Like the GEnie bulletin board system.

Are you somehow under the impression that I was not there?

No assumptions on my part, just saying I remember how cool that seemed ... every horror writer with big bleeding letters...

this feels like gaslighting i am literally being hit with video pop up ads as i try to read this article

Anyone who experienced Geocities would never ever EVER want to go back there.

GIF banners, pop-ups, bright colors ,frames …I miss them so much

sparkly cursors

I'm taking you out of my webring

How dare you? The only thing bad about Geocities is that that design ethos peaked with www.spacejam.com

I believe you mean “classic”.

Also, “good”, “decent”, and “useful”

and easy

"clean"

Was Still better than it is now , like maybe by a long long mile . Now you have ads and auto playing videos plastered over every fucking thing and you get a little port hole to watch through. Some sites are so bloated with crap they crash if you scroll too fast cuz the takeover ad fucks up.

So it still was in 1998, 2002, and 2005. Though I do miss the Geocities/Angelfire DIY esthetic sometimes

I miss some things about the old web. I do not miss table-based website layouts. I will say though, that during the 90's and early 2k, accessibility was on the rise and common practice for most developers. Ever since Web 2.0 it's been in steep decline, and that sucks.

Have you ever felt nostalgic for the feel of old tech? You will.

Tbh fastcompany mobile isn't looking much better

3 years later though www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs34...

Gabocorp flash website in 1997www.youtube.com YouTube video by Web Design Museum

kids today don’t know how privileged they are to have iframes

yes, incredibly ugly, as you say. a veritable pain for the eye. pixel salad. but then we had nicolas pioch's wonderful weblouvre with lots of (almost) hi-res images (saved here for posterity > www.ibiblio.org/wm/) that took ages to load.

WebMuseum: Bienvenue! (Welcome from the curator)www.ibiblio.org

The beautiful glow of Lynx on my amber phosphor monitor was certainly less ugly than many of today's browsers rendering current sites.

AND WE LOVED IT

The irony of trying to read this article on mobile is delicious

Also very very slow, even on a university network.

Not ugly; it was utilitarian. It was also relatively fast, given the bandwidth available and to a very large degree, it was ad free and cookies didn’t follow you around spying on your every move. I’d happily give up “pretty” for “private”.

1. None of that web traffic was encrypted. It could be read by anyone on the network. 2. pretty/private is not the tradeoff and it never was.

My 1994 personal web page had a brick facade background with white text and pictures of Beavis and Butthead on it so, yes.

So were pre-human primates, and yet we evolved from them.

Recall that certain browsers - Cello, for example - didn’t support graphics? Also, that much of the content was written by hand using simple text editors. I had one of South Africa’s first web pages - on Ebola and other HDVs, in fact!

oh god i remember the fish cam

and it’s fast becoming incredibly ugly again, albeit in very different ways…

📌

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