The most reliable tangible record of web design ca. 1994-2001 will be, ironically, the innumerable printed how-to books about it. Remember how laughable most of those were? Well, they have screenshots. We won't be able to recreate how the sites *behaved*, and thus when the retro design backlash arrives (sooner or later you know this will happen, as surely as 8-bit graphics did), the kids of tomorrow will be freely taking liberties with assumptions about how the web used to work.
@ardgedee did you see Radiohead have resurrected their 97 site for the rerelease of ok computer. Blast from the past. Was one of the sites that made me pick up a book on HTML
@twistedonion Nope! I didn't come around on Radiohead until a long time after that era, I'll have to check it out now.
@ardgedee won't take you long, the simplicity is something I miss. Back when the web had the potential to be a free form zone of individual communication. No ads, no "ai", no real analytics. Just markup and a hope that what you put out got read.
Anyone could learn a bit of HTML and get some space to create. Now everyone is guided through closed systems. Who leaves Facebook these days to explore the web? I'd bet it's a minority. Content creation is mostly done through a third party service now.