Did web design get worse before it got better? I'm torn on the mid-90s shift.

I swear GeoCities pages from 1996 had more personality than the cookie-cutter sites from 1998. That spacer gif phase really killed the raw creativity, didn't it? Which era do you think actually produced better content, the cluttered chaos or the early table-based layouts?

2 comments

2 Comments

pat36019d ago

Table-based layouts were just as chaotic, just more boring.

brian_ward5519d ago

What exactly do you mean by "just as chaotic" - were you actually working with table layouts back then or just reading about them? Because sure, the code was ugly and bloated, but at least columns stacked consistently across browsers which was more than you could say for early CSS. The real nightmare was nested tables where you spent hours chasing down a single pixel gap, not the layout concept itself.