I was reading a bit on the Discovery Channel website this morning and one of their links took me to a webpage hosted by the US National Park Service. The contrast between the highly professional Discovery Channel webpage and the old-fashioned page on the NPS.gov website just astounded me. Take a look:
Screen capture of the Discovery Channel webpage
Screen capture of the NPS.gov webpage
That NPS webpage is so plain and fundamental -- so old-fashioned -- it gave me a real sense of nostalgia. And we're only talking about memories from a decade or so ago!
I was introduced to the World Wide Web back in August of 1994 when a friend (hi, Mitch!) and I attended a PC User's Group meeting (we weren't members) that was giving a live demo of this new branch of the Internet (I'd used email and Gopher before in school, but nothing on the WWW). The pages were so alive and rich, I remember thinking at the time. This NPS page looks exactly like the WWW that teemed and thrived in those initial years; early HTML standards hand-coded with text editors. How simple, how quick-loading! Of course, then we moved into the whole flaming, spinning logo era and innocence was lost.
Anyway, pardon my reminiscing. I thought I'd post these screen caps because in a few years, it will be more and more difficult to stumble across a page that has none of the pretense/sophistication that more contemporary tools like Javascript and CSS enable.
Not me. My temptations to learn CSS and java are very short lived. I have no intention of abondoning my style (HTML 1.0, pretty much). Sure, I've got a part of my site that's a wiki, but other than that, it's all HTML and CGI. :) I've actually been complimented on my "old school" style, much in the same way you were complimenting the NPS web site. I prefer them as well.
I hear ya, Greg! Heck, all the pages I maintain manually are in bare-bones HTML as well. I mean, take a look at my personal homepage. Even though I know some CSS, I still prefer tables. :-)