> People just gradually realised proper and standardised web design makes the Web better for everyone, by making it more usable and accessible.
Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc.
It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!)
Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.
Sophisticated technology allows bigger mistakes, but the most important difference between 1998 annoyances and 2017 annoyances is malice and submission to external interests becoming standards and replacing, to a large extent, innocent carelessness and ignorance.
For example, a self-hosted banner ad was an abuse of client bandwidth and an issue between webmasters and their audience, while a modern banner ad from Google is an attack on user privacy that a Google serf who wants a little money perpetrates against another Google serf who wants convenient "services" for the benefit of their common master.
Then gradually forgot about it? These days we have our WingDings (FontAwesome), popups ("please subscribe to our newsletter" modals), best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4 ("you are using an outdated browser"), best viewed in 800x600 ("please rotate your device"), auto-playing General MIDI music (auto-playing videos), slow load times (not due to a 28.8k modems, but bloat) and other ridiculous practices that don't really have any 1998 equivalents (hijacking scrolling, pop-in-pop-out menus, hijacking the browser history or giant banners that follow you around as you scroll (without using frames, so good practice!)). Often for no good reason. Where we had <marquee> we now have pop-in chat bots, subscription reminders, social media sharing links using a third of the screen, nonsensical page transitions etc.
It's all exploiting what could be very useful technology, and I'm not saying it's much better or much worse, but at least in the 90s the regression you'd experience by not running any scripts was that there wouldn't be any asterisk snowflakes falling around christmas, not that the plain text article you were about to read suddenly became unreadable or unnavigable. It seems the lessons consistently learned from the past are the most trivial and are ignorant of the cause of the original criticisms. Don't use tables for layout (instead implement your convoluted page layout using <div> pyramids and CSS hacks!), don't use frames (use "position: fixed;" to waste screen real estate instead, and use JS to break navigation!)
Web people were for a brief moment enthused with the idea of proper human- and machine readable content markup respecting established standards. But we're not there any more if we ever were, developers preferring to serve the most simple content using 500k of JavaScript and 200k of CSS browser workarounds over plain (X)HTML with simple styling.