[lkrubner]

As far as I know, this particular trend was started by Phillip Greenspun back in 1994:

http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/

I recall many people accussed him of hypocrisy, since, in the mid 90s, he was a big advocate of graphically simple web pages, pages that could easily go over a modem and a phone line, yet he bloated his pages with images that had nothing to do with the content of the page.

[mechanical_fish]

Greenspun was writing articles specifically for web and photo nerds. Just as the developer-oriented sites were the first to drop support for IE6, I'm sure he felt safe offering less-than-optimal support for AOL users with dialup modems.

I always liked Greenspun's idiosyncratic photos. It was fun to try and spot thematic links between the photos and the text. Usually they were so subtle that you doubted their very existence, but sometimes they were obvious and funny.