Showing all posts about web design

alive internet theory, bringing the dead internet back to life

11 November 2025

alive internet theory, all lower case, by Spencer Chang:

alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it — every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.

This is the sort of séance I can get into.

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ISP customer hompages lists, the first web directories of the early web

10 October 2025

Via Jelloeater on Bluesky, Jeppe Larsen’s early memories of the web, from the late 1990’s:

I remember the ISP was called get2net and it came with both email and web hosting. The last bit was particularly exciting as get2net had a listing of all homepages made by its customers on their website, which was an absolute fantastic way to discover other HTML enthusiasts and of course contribute with my own handcrafted HTML manually uploaded via FTP. The web was a lot more personal, filled with handcrafted websites where people mostly just wrote about themselves and their hobbies.

My ISP in the late nineties also had a list of customer’s homepages (Internet Archive link). One of the earliest iterations of a web directory perhaps. I frequently perused the list, visiting each site regularly for a time. Some pages were not dissimilar to what you’d see on Geocities. Avril & Andrew’s home page (Internet Archive link), is one I clearly recall, on account of the easy to remember URL.

But it wasn’t just customers checking out each other’s websites.

At one point the splash page (remember those?) of my website featured a violin. I have no idea why now. I’d put a purple tint on it, with Photoshop, and liked the way it gleamed on the white background of my site. Anyway, there was some problem with the site and I’d had to call, on the phone, a landline no less, the ISP.

You didn’t get through to a call centre back then, you spoke to the people who owned the company. I forget their names, but I usually spoke to one of two somewhat sarcastic guys.

Having explained the issue, and being put on “hold” while whoever had taken call went to investigate, I heard him say to his colleague, “yeah, I’ve got violin guy on the phone…”. The colleague responded, saying something like, “oh, purple violin guy?” You wouldn’t see that sort of… familiarity today.

Despite the snarky attitude, I was pleased no end to be actually speaking to non-acquaintances who looked at my website. Occasionally the “webmaster”, the person who looked after the servers, would also reply — usually in the middle of the night — to some of my support emails.

Something else that would never happen today.

The ISP was taken over several times during the time I was with them, growing with each buy-out. The customer homepage list vanished, along with the two original staffers, whom I never spoke to again. I sometimes wonder what became of them, the ex-ISP startup founders, the then nocturnal webmaster, along with Avril and Andrew, and where they are now.

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Classic Web, a Mastodon page that explores the web of old

16 July 2025

Specifically, the time frame encompassing the dot-com boom (late 1990’s), Web 2.0 (early twenty-first century), and the 2010’s. The 2010’s don’t seem that long ago, but then again it’s been nearly six years since. Six years is close to thirty internet years (LinkedIn page), if you subscribe to the idea.

Classic Web features screenshots of websites from this period, and is curated by Richard MacManus, creator of Cybercultural, which documents the history and cultural impact of the internet, and founder of defunct tech blog, ReadWriteWeb.

I feels a certain ambivalence looking back at some of these old websites, particularly those of the dot-com and Web 2.0 eras. The web had a bit more character back then — certainly from a visual perspective — but there were downsides. Lack of accessibility, and even a sense of aesthetics, among them. But while we might have more accessibility today, visually the web appears more generic.

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Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS

8 July 2025

United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:

HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.

It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.

The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.

See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.

Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.

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If you knew David Siegel, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Jakob Nielsen, you were an early web designer

31 May 2025

Richard MacManus, writes about three of the best known web designers of the late 1990’s. All three were influential (yet were not influencers), though by way of their individual approaches to web design, were sometimes at odds with each other:

With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for ‘hacks’, Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability.

It was the thing during those Web 1.0 days to completely ignore Nielsen. It was only later we came to realise he was onto something.

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HTML: a programming language, not mere markup

9 January 2025

Tim Carmody, writing for Wired:

Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language. “That’s not real code; it’s just markup” is a common refrain. Now, I’m no stranger to the austere beauty of the command line, from automating scripts to training machine-learning models. But underestimating HTML is a mistake.

I might venture to say that the HTML of today is more like a programming language, than the HTML I began working with (and sort of continue to do so) back in the late nineties. Some web designers of the day were adamant HTML was markup, not code (which I sometimes labelled it as), and certainly not a programming language.

HTML gave online life to all manner of web creative’s ideas, how could people fail to see this?

<sarcasm on> Oh now satisfying it is to be vindicated all these years later. </sarcasm off>

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Linux OSs and CGI scripts: awesome, but not for everyone

23 October 2024

David Heinemeier Hansson looks at why more people don’t migrate to Linux operating systems:

The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It’s hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.

I run Linux Mint, possibly the most user-friendly Linux distribution AKA distro. For some reason, who knows, Mint reminds me of when I used to tinker with CGI scripts. I’m not talking about CGI as in computer generated imagery, but common gateway interface. In the days of old, CGI scripts helped make personal websites a little more interactive. They could do all sorts of things, but were widely used to power contact forms and guestbooks.

Web designers would hunt around for a CGI script that might aid them to do something or other on their website. In the same way a, say, WordPress publisher today would search out plug-ins. Once a suitable script had been located, they’d then go about configuring it, obviously provided their web host supported CGI scripts. While most scripts came ready to use, they usually required tweaking. Care needed to be taken doing this, because a misstep could render the script useless. Or worse.

For the first ten years I had a website, I hosted it at a smaller operation based in Sydney, NSW. They had a “sandbox” arrangement in place, where CGI scripts could be loaded, and if something went wrong, isolated, without bringing the whole server down. I haven’t used CGI in a long time now, but the configuration experience seems comparable to Mint. It’s mostly setup and ready to run, but still needs tweaks here and there.

But that’s enough to put off some people, even those who would like to move away from, especially, Windows operating systems. It’s unfortunate, but entirely understandable. Most of us just want to push the button, and see something happen.

I should conclude this discussion by making mention of the webmaster — a person, not a team, they were too small for that — at my long gone old web host. I’d often email the support people with questions about some difficulty configuring a CGI script, and he’d respond. My questions must have been too much for the regular support crew (er, duo), and would be forwarded to the guy actually looking after the servers.

He’d send replies at like three o’clock in the morning with suggestions on what to do, which always helped. Remember we’re talking the late nineties here, but this sort of thing said a lot about the earlier days of the web: it often felt like it was all happening during the middle of the night. But emails from the webmaster themselves: that has to be something you’d probably never see today, a hands-on person, instead of a customer service rep, taking the time to help out.

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Building a website is easy: a guide to the first steps

16 October 2024

HTML for people, by American software developer Blake Watson, is a helpful resource for people wishing to build their first website, with a simple text editor. HTML for people guides first time web designers through the process of creating webpages, to uploading them, to produce a live website.

You, my friend, are about to go from zero to internet by putting your very first homemade page on the web. I will let you in on a little secret — websites are just files with text. They don’t require fancy, expensive software to create. You can literally make a website with Notepad. In fact, that’s what we’ll do right now.

It’s literally that simple, and it’s what I did — using Notepad, a simple text editor — way back in the day, to create the first version of disassociated. I was still using NotePad until recently, to create the PHP files here. If you’re on Linux, Mousepad is a simple text editor you could try there.

But even today, you can still comfortably go old-school, and build a website using component HTML files, e.g. an index page, about page, blog page, etc, using a simple text editor, without the need for CMS software, such as WordPress, if you so wanted.

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Jeffrey Zeldman: I stayed, and declined an Automattic severance

8 October 2024

New York City based web designer, standards advocate, founder of A List Apart, and many other things, Jeffrey Zeldman:

I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.

I didn’t know Zeldman worked at Automattic, but I used to read his website/blog every day when I worked as a web designer.

Without getting involved in the WordPress/WP Engine imbroglio, the Automattic severance package seemed quite generous, given it catered for employees who disagreed with the company’s stance. It seems to me dissenting employees anywhere else would simply be shown the door.

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Independent websites: vital for the survival of the hyperlink

3 October 2024

This Halifax Examiner article, by Philip Moscovitch, which features a number of quotes by Matt Pearce, a Los Angeles Times journalist, recorded on a recent episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, has been doing the rounds. The upshot being hyperlinks, links from one webpage to another, are in danger of becoming obsolete. Extinct. Quite unsurprisingly, social media, and some search engines, are among the culprits intent on “degrading” hyperlinks:

There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It’s something that’s kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That’s why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well…

Threads, Meta’s micro-blogging platform, allows hyperlinks to be included in posts at the moment. Whether though they “degrade” them, in X/Twitter style, down the line, remains to be seen. Instagram has never been hyperlink friendly, but remember it started out as a platform for sharing photos, not links.

Not long after I started making websites in the late 1990’s, I read an article about Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web in 1991. The piece is long gone now, but as I recall it, Berners-Lee said when he devised HTML, the markup language used to build websites, he made it intentionally simple to use (though maybe hard to master…). This so information could be shared easily:

However, in 1991 the internet changed again. That year, a computer programmer working at the CERN research center on the Swiss-French border named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web: an internet that was not simply a way to send files from one place to another but was itself a “web” of linked information that anyone on the Internet could retrieve. Berners-Lee created the Internet that we know today.

Here we are, all these years later, where some people would like to do away with one of the web’s building blocks, which made everything we have today possible in the first place. Go figure. Well, link-haters are gonna hate, and do their best rid their web of hyperlinks, I guess. What this does though is underline the importance of an independent web, and websites that are interlinked by hyperlinks. Continue freely and abundantly sharing those links everyone.

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