Leí hace unos días un artículo fenomenal y nostálgico sobre los primeros años de la web, en los que no había CSS para estilar la visualización y en los que yo mismo hice mis primeras webs recurriendo a todos los trucos de baja tecnología que en él se mencionan. Como no me lo quito de la cabeza he decidido copia aquí un par de párrafos:
Keeping your site consistent was thus something of a nightmare. One solution was to simply not style anything, which a lot of folks did. This was nice, in some ways, since browsers let you change those defaults, so you could read the Web how you wanted.
A clever alternate solution, which I remember showing up in a lot of Geocities sites, was to simply give every page a completely different visual style. Fuck it, right? Just do whatever you want on each new page.
That trend was quite possibly the height of web design.
Damn, I miss those days. There were no big walled gardens, no Twitter or Facebook. If you had anything to say to anyone, you had to put together your own website. It was amazing. No one knew what they were doing; I’d wager that the vast majority of web designers at the time were clueless hobbyist tweens (like me) all copying from other clueless hobbyist tweens. Half the Web was fan portals about Animorphs, with inexplicable splash pages warning you that their site worked best if you had a 640×480 screen.
El problema no es que echemos de menos esa forma incómoda de mantener una web, eso no es más que nostalgia de un tiempo en el que además éramos muy jóvenes, sino que hemos perdido mucho más que eso:
Sadly, that’s all gone now — paved over by homogenous timelines where anything that wasn’t made this week is old news and long forgotten. The web was supposed to make information eternal, but instead, so much of it became ephemeral. I miss when virtually everyone I knew had their own website. Having a Twitter and an Instagram as your entire online presence is a poor substitute.
Léanlo entero, luego hace un repaso de tiempos ya pasados pero no tan remotos. Si no vivieron aquellos años dudo mucho que lleguen a imaginarlo tan solo a través de esta lectura, pero si los vivieron van a disfrutar todas y cada una de sus palabras.
