What became of the earliest web aesthetic

Olia Lialina's illustrated essay "Vernacular Web 2" builds on her earlier work, which is to "collect, classify and describe the most important elements of the early Web - visual as well as acoustic - and the habits of first Web users, their ideas of harmony and order." The earliest days of the web were unkind to traditional designers, many of whom took some time to come to grips with floating window sizes, user-selectable fonts, and the limited palette of design elements in early HTML. The result was a folk-aesthetic, where untrained eyes and sensibilities dominated the look of the net. Much of that original look is gone now, but Lialina's work brings it back and starts to delve into what it all means -- and how its progeny still can be found online today.

And today, in the end of June 2007, when we hear of amateur culture more often than ever before, the cultural influence of "Welcome to My Home Page" web pages looks especially interesting. People who created them and their ideas of what the Web is, how it can be used and how the pages should look, these people's likes and mistakes gave the today's Web its current shape.

To me, what defines the history of Web is not just the launch dates of new browsers or services, not just the dot-com bubbles appearing or bursting, but also the appearance of a blinking yellow button that said "New!" or the sudden mass extinction of starry wallpapers.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

• [Tedly Teddington]

  Does this mean http://iamtedwilson.com) is out-of-date?

• [Hodur]

  I miss the old Web 1.0 pages. I started surfing the web in 1995 or 1996 (when I was around 7 years old) and almost nobody else here in Chile had internet. Good times.

  We had to make a website for school and we did it very Web 1.0 in purpose: powered by FrontPage with frames, a repeating image in the background, animated gifs, MIDIs, fonts with green flourescent colors, broken links, hosted in GeoCities… it was a lot of fun actually.

• [Reid]

  [this is rad].

• [MoogleLally]

  I’m actually going back and rereading a bunch of books that came out in the early 90s about the new ‘cybernet’ taking computers by storm.

  What got me started was Andrew Keen, actually. After reading his laughable book talking about how Web 2.0 is sure to doom us all, I went back and found old books telling us to lock up our daughters from the mean and nasty internet. You know, for a laugh. Some of these old books were really ridiculous.

  Now my reading list is much broader. I’m learning how people first approached this new found connectivity, how excited they were. It’s really interesting… After I read everything (about 30 books!) I’ll make an amazon list of them.

• [dcoates]

  If you want to see the early web, just spend some time on your local real estate broker web site. Embedded midi, animated .gifs, poorly resized images, you name it. And the truly sad thing is that these brokers are paying people to make these websites and getting this in return.

• [Erica]

  Oh man, I totally used that blinking starry wallpaper for my first ever website… a free Angelfire one. I can’t say I miss it though.

• [Chris L]

  Heh, Tripod mystified me when I first discovered the internet. I wanted my website to be classy, though. No horrible scrolling backgrounds for me thank you. Nope, my summer days passed as I wrestled with tables. Thick bordered tables with custom colors to make them look like picture frames. Went nice with the puke green flat background and bold, red, courier font.

  Oh and a scrolling marquis site tag line, set up to display a new nugget of wisdom every time the page reloaded.

• [ernie]

  You can relive those days of tacky pages and stay fully compliant with Bruce Lawson’s “Geocities 1996″ stylesheet here:

  http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/zen/sample.css