My website-making days also were my graphic-design-school days, so while they could be a little on the weird side I at least tried to make them clean, readable, and aesthetically non-hazardous. Well, apart from that one wonder that wouldn’t look right on Netscape.
It was great to be able to do this entirely by hand and still end up with something no worse than professional sites in appearance. (And there weren’t yet a bazillion laws and regulations in my country making it too complicated for an undermotivated single private individual to attempt to stay compliant)
Myspace also got a number of people playing with HTML and CSS if I remember correctly. It's been years. Not sure CSS is actually even used anymore. I enjoyed web design classes back in the 2000s. Macromedia still owned Dreamweaver and it wasn't all that great, so I could still do better by hand. I haven't played around with any of it in years now, but I assume those programs have GUIs that blow away anything that can be written in notepad like back then.
If you've never trouble shot 100 pages of JavaScript in notepad because you didn't have access to other tools, you haven't had "fun" before. ...fucking nightmare. Find out you put an extra space somewhere.
The better you got though you'd narrow down finding those errors quickly, and then eventually find out a fucking free program will color code the shit and tell you to look at line 232 because it doesn't make sense
CSS is still used. Modern web toolkits like bootstrap and tailwind can reduce or eliminate the need to write CSS explicitly. Some tools like Sass extend CSS. They all generally produce regular CSS that gets read by the browser.
Parts of my old AngelFire website is still archived. A horrible mess of Comic Sans, black backgrounds with lime green and dark red or purple text, animated gifs, auto-playing sounds, frames and pretty much any and all features of HTML, especially things you never really saw being used like blinking and color changing text that wasn't just an image.
Too bad none of the Klik'n'Play games I made and had uploaded there are able to be downloaded... I kinda want to be reminded exactly what the Pikachu virtual pet I made was like in all it's cringe glory. Though Nintendo would probably be sending an army of lawyers up my ass rn if it was.
My site was on a local dialup provider when I was roughly 12. It had all lava as the background with flame gifs everywhere. Brief bio, cheats for MechWarrior, Doom, etc on different pages. I did fuck with frames.
A journalist emailed me about profiling young web developers and I was so fucking nerdy and anxious I never responded.
Oh shit how could I forget different midis for each page. Nirvana and Black Sabbath mostly.
The old internet taught us so many random skills. I couldn't type on a keyboard for jack until I got into MMO's back in the day, because it was pre voice comms. So I learned to type faster so I would struggle less XD
I learnt HTML and JS by viewing the source code of major sites like Yahoo (this was in the early 2000s so CSS wasn't extremely widespread yet). That's practically impossible these days due to how much bulkier sites have gotten. Back then, HTML and JS were simple, unminified, and easy to understand.
Now you can't even read a blog's html to understand what it is doing, as it's being hosted by a website builder doing 2 billion weird things most likely.
I don't know why she's nervous, she clearly knew the spec well and didn't have to resort to modern abstraction frameworks to serve a simple static site.
It's overkill for static sites, but credit should be given to JSX for being a decent way to create DOM nodes dynamicly. You can use a JSX transformer without using React, too.
Reminds me of the time I was using Microsoft frontPage. now CSS and js frameworks have become a science of its own that reinvents itself every two years.
Wow I was thinking about that just the other day (I remember it as "BME pain olympics"). I wonder if it's still floating around out there? But TBH I don't want to know.
That's the extent I remember from grade school, had to make a homepage in like grade 5 and literally everyone had flaming text, crappy gifs, and horrible midi songs. Computer lab must have been a blast for the teachers.
I learned everything I know from CSShelp the Kougra. It's a shame that her page has since been replaced with the species default. It was such a great resource.