In the digital realm’s infancy, web pages were simple, often text-heavy, and truly basic in design. The technologies to create interactive and visually compelling websites were still on the horizon. A simple animated gif, such as the iconic dancing baby, was considered the pinnacle of novelty.
The landscape changed rapidly when it became evident that more attractive and functional websites could be more profitable, catalyzing the rapid evolution of web technology.
The internet of today is a battleground of financial interests, curtailed only by bandwidth constraints, device screen sizes, and browser capabilities. To appreciate how far we’ve journeyed, it’s interesting to revisit the old territory.
Using Tables for Website Layouts
Before CSS came into play, designers used tables – meant for tabular data – for website layouts simply because there were few alternatives and they worked relatively consistently across different browsers.
At the time, the use of tables was supported by:
- Compatibility – Embryonic web technologies were erratic across platforms, but tables behaved reliably.
- Familiarity – Many web designers at the time were self-taught and found tables easier as they resembled familiar print design grids.
However, with the advent of CSS, the convoluted HTML with nested tables was soon abandoned.
Despite their shunned reputation for page layout, the use of table elements for their intended purpose—organizing data—is as relevant as ever.
Transforming Text into Images
Before the advent of web fonts, designers, limited by a small selection of standard system fonts, started embedding text within images, compromising on accessibility and performance for aesthetic appeal and typographic variety.
Why Photoshop is filled with text-styling effects can be traced back to these design habits. When CSS came around, it curtailed this practice and ushered in a more pragmatic approach to web typography.
Clickable Image Maps
Image maps were another inventive solution to the early web’s limitations, enabling designers to define interactive areas within a static image to simulate navigation menus.
This workaround became obsolete with accessible web practices and advancements in CSS rendering them redundant.
Web Directories
Before the era of sophisticated search engines and SEO strategies, web directories like DMOZ played a crucial role in discovering and cataloging websites, a task impossible today due to the sheer size of the web.
- Human curation – Each website was checked by a person, promoting quality.
- Discoverability – Users could explore topics without a specific destination in mind.
- Creativity – Without the constraints of search engine algorithms, web design was exceedingly inventive.
As search engines evolved, the quaint, hand-curated world of web directories made way for algorithm-driven discovery.
The Era of Frames
Frames facilitated the segmented loading of content on different parts of a web page, promoting content reusability and organizational consistency before CMS platforms and templates became the norm.
However, frames posed significant usability, SEO, and security challenges, and were ultimately replaced by more effective web technologies like CSS-based layouts and templating systems.
Flash & Actionscript Revolution
Flash, with its capacity for animation and interactivity via Actionscript, was a groundbreaking innovation for the web. However, it also had its downsides, including heavy resource consumption, security issues, and poor SEO outcomes.
When mobile technologies emerged and did not support Flash, notably with Apple’s rejection of it on the iPhone, Flash’s decline was sealed, paving the way for other technologies like jQuery and eventually modern JavaScript frameworks.
jQuery’s Influence
jQuery, simplifying and standardizing JavaScript usage, became the go-to solution for many challenges Flash once addressed. It improved development times, eased DOM manipulation, and smoothed over cross-browser inconsistencies.
While technologies like Vue, Angular, and React have taken over many tasks jQuery was used for, it’s important to remember that modern JavaScript has evolved partly due to the foundations laid by jQuery.
AMP’s Rise and Fall
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) aimed to enhance mobile web performance by imposing limitations on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This approach had initial benefits, such as faster load times and potential SEO advantages.
Eventually, the constraints of AMP and the controversy over its relationship with Google’s search infrastructure led to its diminished prominence.
Contemplating The Future
It’s a running question in the tech community: what will be the next web technology to fade away? Whether it’s the JPG image format, aging web frameworks, or even inline styles, change is the only constant on the web.
Time will reveal which technologies will endure and which will be relegated to the archives of web history, perhaps even HTML itself one day.
