There’s something that’s nostalgic about the early web. Everyone had their own website for bespoke topics with simple colors, bad clipart, and often times those little pixel logos/badges at the bottom of the page. The title “webmaster” really meant something as there weren’t as many toolkits to help you out with writing your pure HTML website.
Times have changed, and as much as I am delighted that more elaborate web technologies have increased accessibility to the point where anyone can easily share their thoughts with everyone else in the world, I do long for simpler times. I think there’s a certain level of creativity and passion involved with these simple sites. “Less is more” so you have to be a little more clever with making your website distinct and interesting.
If you are interested in what I am talking about, consider visiting the neocities project: https://neocities.org/ where you can create your own website in the same simple format we had back in the days of Yahoo and Geocities for those who remember. You might be surprised at how quickly these websites load and how little gets filtered by your adblocker (you do have one don’t you?), so there’s something to be said for simplicity.
“Content” was less of a daily upload kind of thing back then. It was more a natural evolution of a website with more being added or changed as time went on. Instead of checking Youtube or Facebook you had to go to different websites to see what was going on, which lead to the solution of RSS (real simple syndication) where an application could check on different websites to see if new posts or activity was made. All completely agnostic of a company or website, no login required.
All of this “older” and simpler technology had a certain grace in that it worked together without needing some big tech company involved dictating what you could or could not do.
I do have to say there are a few things I don’t miss about ye olden internet days however:
- Setting emo lyrics as your status message so people wonder if you’re clinically depressed
- auto playing music when you arrive on a website, usually a style you find absolutely distasteful
- really bad low contrast text or busy backgrounds so you can’t read what’s on the screen
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