Debate: Did early HTML sites look better than modern ones or am I just nostalgic?

I rebuilt my old band's website from 1998 last week (it crashed on my modern browser, of course). Half of me thinks those rainbow text and starry background pages had way more personality than today's clean templates. But the other half remembers waiting 5 minutes for a single GIF to load on dial-up in my bedroom in Tucson. Which side are you on? Do you think the janky early aesthetic was actually better, or are we just romanticizing the pain?

2 comments

2 Comments

max8088d ago

starry background pages" made me laugh... but you couldn't actually use those animated star GIFs on most browsers back then without crashing them, at least not on the Netscape 4 I had.

barbaragarcia8d ago

Netscape 4 couldn't handle a single animated snowflake page without locking up my whole computer.