[analyte123]

Doing crazy things with CSS, including animations, has never been easier or more consistent between browsers, and yet creativity in web design has gone down practically to zero these days. I blame mobile, where nobody can seem to escape from the "responsive column of blandly styled content" paradigm.

[johnfn]

My theory for why this is is that in the past when the web was arcane and challenging to learn to develop, this actually acted as a filter for people who had a special sort of intellectual curiosity and passion to really push through and make what they wanted to make. It’s great now that the web is so broadly accessible, but now no such filter exists, so truly creative sites are fewer and further between.

[krapp]

The web wasn't that arcane or challenging to develop for - plenty of people without that much deep technical know-how managed with raw HTML and CSS, copy and paste and w3schools. Although most people weren't that creative, either.

If anything, web development is far more arcane and challenging now. No one just writes HTML, CSS or JS in a text editor anymore, the bare minimum expectation is to use complex frontend frameworks and NPM and compile everything from other languages. Compared to the sprawling, byzantine nightmare of modern web development, JQuery plugins were a breeze.

I think, it's simply the case that the web has matured, and more people are concerned with content than the superficiality of quirky presentation nowadays. Just as it's possible for an author to publish a book without knowing typesetting or running their own press, one can publish to the internet without knowing even the basics of HTML, CSS or JS.

And of course the web has coalesced around a set of standard layouts and visual language, as any media paradigm inevitably does, mostly because it has done so around a few standard frameworks. But then let's be honest, most Geocities sites kind of looked the same, too.

[johnfn]

I mean, this is easy to say, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would willingly go back to 90s era web development of they had a choice. JS was a pitiful version of its current self - and good luck debugging it without browser debugging tools. CSS was done primarily with tables. Iframes were used everywhere. The state of the art web development IDE was notepad++. Browser inconsistencies were rampant and I hope you enjoy working around browser bugs because IE5 is ridden with them.

See, the thing about all the modern development infra we have is that it wasn’t just invented for fun - it solves real problems. Jquery was created to smooth over browser inconsistencies. Webpack was made so that when you import 20 JS files they don’t all clobber each other’s namespaces (ok, there’s a bit more to it, but bear with me here). NPM was made so that you can install dependencies without having to hunt down the JS download on Google.

This whole thing of looking at the past with rose colored glasses is a bit too easy to take too far.

[krapp]

Modern web development has also created its share of problems. Needing to import 20 JS files and manage namespaces isn't a problem anyone had before the JS community decided every "library" had to consist of only a single function rigged to an entire test suite with an arbitrarily deep dependency tree. Sure, finding libraries, adding them in script tags and uploading them directly to the server (or linking to a CDN) wasn't as convenient as using a package manager, but vast sections of the web didn't stop working because a repo got pulled or because the SPOF repository for the language went down.

And then you have compile-to-js languages like Typescript, and the entire paradigm of "javascript as bytecode" which, for all of their benefits in adding safety, also added exponential complexity. Frontend frameworks with their own unique paradigms that generate HTML and CSS entirely in JS, and ignore the separation of concerns the web is actually built around.

All of these have their place and their value, but the fact that "vanilla JS" is coming back as a trend might be a sign that things have strayed a bit too far in the wrong direction.

[johnfn]

I think it's just two camps. The vanillajs camp is people mostly working on their own, who can't imagine what all that overhead is for. The other camp is people mostly working at large corporations, who can't imagine any other way to deal with hundreds of engineers checking in code every day.

[tomgp]

No idea why this has been down voted, I think there’s a lot of truth in it. That said I don’t agree with the conclusion ;) I think there _was_ a more interesting an varied texture to the web back in the day. A feeling of experimentation and a freedom from the pressure to produce something “professional”. It feels like the rules of the medium are much more rigid now and to break them you must choose to do so deliberately rather than just kind of having to because of the lack of existing convention.

[rlt]

So, where are 2021's version of 1990's web?

[johnfn]

I mean, by the time we find it it won’t be niche and arcane any more :-)

Maybe roblox?

[throwaway316943]

Crappy remixes on TikTok and Instagram that can’t hold a candle to the hay day of YTMND?

The other poster is probably right, the indie game scene is pretty prolific with jams and remixes and has more collaboration than most early web phenomena.

[johnfn]

I think that may be nostalgia talking. Some of the stuff my younger cousins send me from tiktok is genuinely hilarious - IMO definitely superior to ytmnd though YMMV.

[percentcer]

indie games

[nine_k]

It's the same reason why most modern books are bland streams of text set in brushed-up typefaces, while medieval manuscripts were written in whimsical hands and richly adorned with full-color illustrations and drop caps decorated over the top.

Back in 1995, a web page was an experimental medium, with very few experts in the field, and few businesses seeing it as a key asset. It could took long to develop, it could look fancy and whimsical, and there were few other sites to compare to, with the same properties. The chance for a web user to encounter something unusual was higher, because there was very little properly usual yet.

Today the web is the main medium, with a lot of standardization which comes from the need to be readable, accessible, look clean, and take as short to develop as possible. The consumer expects the same: simple, familiar packaging, easy access to the content which is usually a piece of text or a picture. This leaves especially little room for fancy on small-screen mobile devices. The web is not more of a place for artistic expression than newspapers were in 1970. Whimsical and fancy designs exist, but they are relatively rare and special-purpose, promo or art pages.

[cosmodisk]

I think I had enough "creativity" from webdesign. Video backgrounds, fading,or reappearing text sections, absurd colour schemes,or overengineered SPAs. I'd happily trade all that shiny wrapping paper into something a bit more boring and consistent.

[iFreilicht]

Absolutely agree. There are so many creative but obnoxious design patterns caused by a need to distinguish a brand or the designers seeing themselves as artists more than engineers. Coolness over usability is commonplace, but it's not a good mantra to follow, and it's genuinely refreshing to see stuff like https://www.nngroup.com/ that is usable and functional on all devices, as boring as it may look.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Look at https://play.date/ or https://tokio.rs/, functional yet interesting. Tokio.rs in particular has the best implementation of one of the worst patterns in the modern web: sticky content that changes when you scroll. It's a great visual aid in this case, but becomes annoying quickly when overused.

[cosmodisk]

Webdesign is no different to physical product design or architecture. These are difficult fields and very few get it right, like Dieter Rams. Design, as a subject,is actually so far from art,even though,as you mentioned, some try to mix them together for some 'cool' results that almost always end up being ridiculously inconvenient to use.

[jgalt212]

yes, blame the SEO mantra of "mobile-first" which has poisoned products that are "mobile-rarely".