I don't see the point to harboring nostalgia about old web design. It was overly simplistic, and the browser wars, instead of accelerating standards acceptance and development, led to a dozen years of aggravated misdirection that ended up harming everybody involved.
For fuck's sake, CSS1 achieved recommendation status in 1996, but it wasn't fully supported in browsers until 2010. Imagine what we could have accomplished in UX development if Netscape and Microsoft had gotten on board.