The web today is not necessarily worse than the early web

27 December 2024

Xavier H.M., writing on his Mastodon page:

Your neocities blog is cute but I can’t read the 5pt font and your cursor is the size of a bread crumb. The web page is loading so many gifs my computer sounds like a boeing 747.

disassociated once, in a way, looked like a Neocities website. Or, more the point, way back in the day: GeoCities-esque. My websites of twenty-five years ago may have seemed like the work of a web designer trying to be artistic, but the way they were built presented problems to some visitors, particularly those with low vision. For example, much text on my early sites was rendered as images.

The facility to use alternative text, or alt-text, was always there, as far as I remember, but like a lot of visual web designers of the time, I did not make effective use of the facility. For example, if say I was posting a photo of a tree, the alt text would literally read “a tree”. I’d say nothing about where the tree stood. Along a road? In a park? Near a body of water? Nor anything else that would help describe the image more fully to people who had trouble seeing it.

As for blocks of text rendered as images — this to maintain complete design control across different browsers and operating systems — I probably supplied no alt-text, even though it would not have been difficult to do so. In other words, much of the content was invisible to some visitors.

And then we get around to font and cursor sizes that would suit an ant. For sure, it’s all fun, but doesn’t work for everyone. Those early days were more about aesthetics rather than accessibility. Today’s websites and blogs might look bland, might look all the same, but they are easier for a greater number of people to use, and, as a bonus, aren’t too demanding on our devices.