Web Design Museum 1991 – 2006 | Hacker News Reader

Web Design Museum 1991 – 2006

webdesignmuseum.org

104 pointskome14 comments

I'm glad to see they have a whole section for 2Advanced. My programming tutor at college told us not to worry about the internet, treating it as a fad. I learnt html (and css) using View Source. And in my world of "my god, the things you can do if you collapse table borders", I spent hours clicking around 2Advanced witchcraft.

I remember always being inspired by the 2advanced flash sites:

https://youtu.be/N-2sKZjawq4

https://youtu.be/TI5RISl6L14

My programming tutor at college told us not to worry about the internet, treating it as a fad

There were quite a few people and companies that thought that way. Microsoft was one of them, and thought people would forever pay it a yearly fee to subscribe to Encarta updates on CDROM.

Fox was another one. I remember when even the smallest television station in the crappiest market had a web site, none of the Fox-owned TV stations had web sites because someone in New York thought the web was a fad.

The first web site I operated was for a TV station in 1997. By 1999 we were putting our video online through a video capture card hooked up to a ReplayTV. I think the Fox O&O across town didn't get a web site until 2005 or 2006.

HotWired changed my life. Was so inspired by their style, and the way their aesthetic grew from the limitations of the medium:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/hotwired-1996

> Photoshop 4.0 codename was Big Electric Cat

I didn't know that. That's also the name of an Australian band from about a decade earlier.

I do remember Photoshop 4 only had one level of undo. Just one. Make two mistakes and you're keeping one of them.

It seems to me that the web started to look like today's web in 2000.

Websites that have been around that long haven't changed their composition a huge amount since then.

I’d argue that they have changed because they support two different shapes, now, with mobile versions.

I think that's roughly the point where CSS was supported well enough to be useful. 2001 was when ie6 was released, so the first browser war was wrapping up at this point and browser features became a bit more fixed.

Thanks for this! A trip to the past, where flash was hero inside a table. After a messy 90’s where web looked like from the 80’s, the 2000’s is where creativity was at. Graphic design took center stage, and interaction experiments would take place in form of websites as if part of an art gallery.

> where web looked like from the 80’s

You're aware right that the world wide web was invented in 1991?

I took that to mean something like "the web in the 1990s still had the aesthetic of graphic design from the 1980s", which seems like a reasonable claim.

Your comment made me laugh :D as blacksmith said, I meant aesthetically, but thanks for raising it was not clear

The year on SpaceJam should say 1996-2020

Good old days

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