[nonesuchluck]

This is fantastic, but not fully in the spirit of the old web. Personal pages looked like they did because they were essentially outsider art: the product of experimentation by teenagers and rank amateurs, who had no idea what we were doing. In 1999 we were using Netscape Composer and FrontPage Express, because they came with our browsers and were fun to explore. Only a web professional could use these tricks today to simulate that appearance.

The click-and-drag tools and absolutely garbage code generators were integral to the experience, because they brought in the weirdos who didn't know we were doing it wrong. We learned, but lost something along the way.

[user3939382]

> FrontPage

          

[chrisweekly]

Having cut my teeth on FrontPage, I remember being unreasonably happy with the markup generated by DreamWeaver.

[alberth]

No-code.

What’s old is new again.

[rafale]

WYSIWYG

[Shared404]

Confluence does the same thing now.

[jonathanoliver]

I only had Notepad (the default Windows text editor). I longed for Microsoft Frontpage and HoTMetaL and Dreamweaver. Looking back, I'm glad gained experience on the native experience rather than through the editor abstractions because it forced me to learn.

[rafale]

I longed for Flash but I learned DHTML instead. I bet many young readers haven't heard of that "technology".

[kyleyeats]

Now I have to do stuff like this manually. Seems like things are regressing.

[Soulsbane]

LOL, also spacer.gif(Not so much FrontPage but it reminded me of the times).

[steveBK123]

we love to see it

[Waterluvian]

The beautiful result of copying and pasting html from your favourite sites. No CSS so the styles came along.

[lnxg33k1]

I used coolpage :D http://web.archive.org/web/20010517033954/http://www.klimane...

[mysterydip]

HotDog Professional, anyone? https://archive.org/details/tucows_194462_HotDog_Professiona...

[nickthegreek]

Hotdog Pro was everything to me. Going from Notepad to Hotdog opened my eyes to the future of the Internet. It set me down a path where I would eventually get my first paid tech gig working at my local newspaper in high school maintaining the photo departments daily web presence.

[actuallyalys]

I think the comparison to outside art is very apt, although I think the boundary between professional and amateur was porous. Professionals wrote the tools amateurs used, they wrote the books and references at least some of those amateurs consulted, and I imagine they originally wrote at least some of the snippets that got copy and pasted endlessly. In theory, a return of the old web (aesthetically and socially) could involve people copying snippets like these. As you mention, the current web's complexity makes that unlikely, unfortunately.

[loloquwowndueo]

HoTMetaL!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HoTMetaL