Exactly my thought when I saw the line "to produce beautiful display text" with an example that would have been atrocious on any GeoCities page.
OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)
I taught myself coding HTML by hand using Hippie. I regressed and switched to Frontpage because it was so "easy". I then went over to the Dreamweaver and stayed there until I learned server-side programming, which put me back in the text editor, where I've happily been since.
Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.
Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.
OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)