Saturday morning spent digging through an old Angelfire archive changed my mind about modern web design

I used to think all those 90s sites with tiled backgrounds and blinking text were just a joke. But last Saturday I pulled up an old Angelfire archive from 1997 that someone had preserved. This one fan site for a band I loved back then was still fully intact with a starry background and MIDI player. The layout was simple but everything worked. No loading spinners, no cookie banners, no 3 different scripts blocking the page. It loaded in under 2 seconds on my slow connection. That got me thinking about how we traded speed and straightforwardness for all these fancy frameworks. Now I'm actually looking at old HTML books again. Has anyone else found an old site that made you reconsider how we build pages today?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_wilson8715d ago

You said "no loading spinners, no cookie banners" but actually those old sites had loading spinners too, just different ones. They were those animated GIFs of a little hourglass or a spinning globe that took forever to finish. And cookie banners? They didn't have them because the EU law for those didn't come until way later, not because the internet was somehow better back then. I get what you mean about speed though, those raw HTML pages were tiny compared to modern bloated sites. But let's be real, half the reason they loaded fast is because they looked like a 12 year old made them in MS Paint with 3 images total. The tradeoff between looking good and loading fast is real, but pretending old sites had no issues is just rose colored glasses.

felix38515d ago

Those old hourglass GIFs were usually just loading screens for dial-up connections, not actual site design problems. Cookie banners being absent because the law didn't exist yet is exactly the point - the internet was less cluttered with junk nobody asked for. Looking better today doesn't mean much when half the page is trackers and ads that slow everything down.