[hatly22]

That is some rose colored welding googles you're wearing there. In the late nineties we had applets, activex, pages crammed with animated gifs, and the browser wars were in full swing between SUN, Microsoft, netscape, internet explorer. And then flash rocked up. Again, it shows how the OP railing against over-design is so subjective. A lot of sites are meant to be interesting ways of showing information, or just people expressing themselves. People complaining about the design of websites (and writing snooty blog posts about it on usenet) happened in the nineties too, even more so when flash took over.