Top Web Design Styles of 1993

if you think that's crazy, this is still sold as well: https://www.unisys.com/product-info-sheet/ecs/clearpath-mast...

that's not the mcp you think it is...it's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP

If you think that's surprising, what about the fact that they're still maintaining ColdFusion? https://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion-family.html

Arguably, it's democratized people putting things on the internet. But because there's less work involved to do so, there's also less effort put in.

It's not new - anyone could write a low effort shitpost in a text input, I know I did 20+ years ago - but I do believe that a website or any product becomes better if it takes more effort to make it in the first place.

I'm also thinking of early iOS apps, where loads of people balked because of the very long app submission guidelines, the $99 barrier to entry and the week-long critical Apple review - but it gave Apple a huge advantage as generally speaking, iOS apps were good, Android apps were mediocre or at the very least highly inconsistent, quality wise.

There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.

(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)

[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.