The 2000s, the golden age of web design, when people built inaccessible IE6-only mystery-meat navigation websites with Flash and HTML tables that dynamically loaded JS using iframes.
Can't upvote this enough. People have very selective memory of how the 2000s web worked. Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere. Incredibly fucked up tables with no semantic meanings in your HTML just to do what modern flexbox now does in two lines. No one cared about accessibility of anything. Clicking on anything can get you pwned because you never updated your Flash player which has an RCE vulnerability. And yes, so many websites will tell you to use Internet Explorer for best experience.
I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.
> Every other website requires Flash just to show you a carousel of images. "Serious" business websites implemented in slow, buggy Java applets. iframes everywhere.
Do you see the irony? This is a very selective example by itself. The table based minimal HTML + CSS websites existed throughout the decades (even so today) which is what I'm referring to specifically.
I'm not dunking on your whole argument, but as for this specific point: as someone who finds the mouse difficult to use and requires the keyboard a lot, the web definitely used to be a lot more accessible in this regard. There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.
> There's no keyboard navigability anymore. And it would be so simple, just put an accesskey attribute on your buttons and textboxes. Nobody does it, anywhere.
Nobody added those attributes in the 90s/2000s either, it's just that desktop apps (like browsers) all implemented keyboard navigation properly by default.
The real loss here isn't html authors being too lazy to add the attribute, it's that our modern desktop environments/apps stopped implementing keyboard navigation as a default
Table-based layouts that loaded faster and rendered better than anything you see today, and even read better on actually existing screenreaders (who never got the memo that tables are supposed to be less accessible than CSS and changing <b> into <strong> should make your site more disability-friendly).
You're referring to the mid-late 2000s. I'm talking about the early 2000s. You can hate Flash all you want, but for all the HTML5 hype we had back then, there isn't a single authoring tool today that's not even equivalent to the original Flash Studio (by Macromedia). It was the only tool in internet's entire history where both artists and programmers could work on together. Or sometimes even without each other.
What do you have now with all your fancy React and JS libraries that's pulled off something that Flash did?
Flash died because of the carcinogen that Adobe is. It could have been the future of HTML5 had they actually invested in it.
Look at the pathetic state of HTML5 today. What tool should a non-coder use to output something you could do with keyframes on Flash studio in 5 minutes in the 2000s? There's absolutely nothing quite the equivalent of Flash. You need to write 100+ lines of code to get something decent out of HTML5 that involves animation. There are paid niche tools, but nothing at the scale of what Flash pulled off.
You're not talking about the web, you're talking about authoring tools. There are (or were) plenty of modern Flash successors; it's just that most people don't use them when you can open a game engine and target the web that way.
> You're referring to the mid-late 2000s
Things like hidden iframe hacks to load JavaScript were a thing as far back as the late 90s, and table layouts have existed as long as HTML tables have.
Tangential but I remember Flash being killed by Steve Jobs and then smartphones in general. The iPhone’s battery couldn’t handle it or in any case he didn’t want to support it. I remember Flash being so prominent when iPhone 1 came out that the decision not to support it was shocking.
> The iPhone’s battery couldn’t handle it or in any case he didn’t want to support it
Very much the latter. Apple didn't want to give Adobe control of a big part of their new ecosystem - and they were already at loggerheads over Apple shipping native PDF capabilities in OSX
Every time is a beautiful time and a terrible time; it's just a matter of framing. I just don't think it's correct to point to the 2000s as some kind of golden age of amazing web design and tech.
I get being frustrated with some aspects of the modern web. But a lot of people are reminding of that Naomi Wolf tweet about how Belfast was calm and peaceful in the 1970s.