At Cybercultural, Richard McManus looks at the early heydey of web design and "three musketeers" pioneering the discipline long before it was lost to frameworks, adtech and social media: Jacob Nielsen, Jeffrey Zeldman and David Siegel. Back then there were other hazards, such as HTML tables, Flash, and Microsoft.
As 1997 progressed, the schism between the aesthetic approach to web design (personified by Siegel) and the semantic approach (personified by Nielsen) widened. Jeffrey Zeldman found himself in the middle of this. He was a proponent of CSS, but he also wasn't above using new tools that disregarded semantic coding — like Shockwave and Flash. Over the coming years, Zeldman continued to insist that web design could be both aesthetic and standards-compliant. "Images, table layouts, style sheets, JavaScript, server-side technologies like PHP, and embedded technologies like Flash and Quicktime are all compatible with the rigors of accessible site design," he wrote as late as July 2002.
"Zeldman," intones McManus, "would eventually turn his back on Flash."
Nielsen now has a normative online presence but I look at his old site (screenshotted above) and think he should never have taken it down. It was not obsolete, and what's superficially "wrong" with it could be fixed with a few bytes of CSS and a meta tag. It's hypertext brutalism and I just think it's neat.
