Jeffrey Veen argues for the practical advantages of new web standards:
"Huge interfaces squeezed through plodding modem connections have been a plague since the Web's inception. The increasing dominance of broadband has only helped a bit. A hotel phone line plugged into a business traveler's laptop may be the only tenuous link you've got to a new customer. Adopting clean, standardized code gives users a shortcut to accomplishing their goals at your site."
And, in tribute to HotWired and the old school of web design, I present a list of things I miss from when the web was young:
- webmaster@hostname email addresses
- "best viewed in Netscape 2" buttons
- colored bullet images
- rainbow divider lines
- that under construction digging guy
- no .htm
- h1, h2, h3 (making a comeback thanks to CSS)
- background patterns (also back in style)
