I remember Frontpage 98 along with Outlook 98 they were offered as free upgrades from older versions. I had Frontpage 97 and Outlook 97.
For programming, I used Visual Interdev which resembled Microsoft Visual Code more than Frontpage. Visual Interdev was part of the Visual Studio package.
It's what we used to call anyone who was a web developer back then. Bit of a mix between a system admin and front-end developer with maybe some perl tinkering in place.
Quite simply, the person in charge of the web site. In those days, it was likely to be the person who wrote the HTML, wrote the content and set up the web server.
There are still quite a lot of them about in smaller companies - they keep Wordpress patched, post news stories, update pages etc.
It used to be convention that emails to webmaster@[domain.com] would go to whoever was responsible for maintaining the website. I don't think anyone ever had it as an official job title, however.
Ah! Those were the days when there were no admins, there were 'webmasters'! They were the people behind building and maintaining the website. Think webdev + ops. Nothing today compares to the grandeur of being a 'Webmaster' in 1996 :)
there was also this thing between webmasters, called banner exchange. that's how you got new traffic to your website.
i remember when i did my first gaming review site up in high school i was trying to get my banner to as many other sites as i could and they would get the place on my site. i remember tweaking my banner in macromedia flash :)
It's embarrassing to say but in my company, I'm still "the webmaster". And by reading your question I conclude that it's because no one has any idea about what I'm doing.
It's too grandiose a term honestly. And it does not really convey the role the role-holder does. It's a really confusing term. I guess the term came around when the web was still young and was used as a precursor to "guru".
Nothing grandiose, it's derived from "postmaster" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmaster_(computing)) — a person responsible for a mail server, which itself is borrowed from the IRL postmaster, a head of a post office. Likewise, "webmaster" is a person responsible for a web site.
Born in 91, I was the perfect age to be obsessed with Harry Potter. When I was around ten, an older kid in the neighborhood helped me make a Harry Potter themed website using FrontPage (the Express version I think it was named).
Small, random event that end up having a big effect on my life. My hobbies, what&where I chose to study, the friends I got there etc. I can trace back to this.
Oh man, I had a similar experience around 2000. I built a Danish website about Goldeneye 64 in FrontPage. The first website I ever made. It used frames, but I feel it was quite pleasing on the eyes, because I avoided a lot of the 'fancy effects' that was common for the time.
I'll admit, being born in 87, most of the site was simply copied from other websites about the game, and translated to Danish. So it was a decent exercise - particularly for someone dyslexic as me - to both built a website and translate from English to Danish.
Why did and does everyone hate frames so much? Do they not have their place even on modern sites sometimes? (Even if they aren't technically frames?) The top bar of Google Docs is a visual frame and it seems appropriate to me.
And frames have a feature I love that's almost never implemented nowadays: You can click+drag the border to freely resize the frames and see the content better.
Made a Pokemon fan site, must have been 9 or something, I didn't know how to link to other pages, so everything was one page and links worked via anchors...
Oh man, me too. I couldn’t figure out anything about dynamic web pages except that I needed a host with “cgi-bin support”. I wanted to build a Neopets alternative, and when I couldn’t figure out how to do anything dynamic, I figured I could just build out a new page for every combination of variables that could change.
I was like, 7, so my math skills didn’t really allow me to understand the scope of the number of pages that would be required.
I made a Nintendo fan site with FrontPage 2000 (well the first version was made with Word which made atrocious HTML but I migrated quickly).
It was complete with all the expected features of the time, including an autoplaying MIDI Pokémon background music, Comic Sans everywhere and 3D rotating text gifs made with Xara X3D. Oh and moving text in the status bar.
Wow, I would have loved to be friends with all the guys in this thread. I didn't have a single friend with this kind of interests, none of my friends would be interested in creating stuff instead of just consuming it.
There were sooo many crap webpages created with that software. I used it myself for a while, before I knew better. It produced horrendous, buggy HTML. Table handling was pants - I used to have to hand code tables (used for layout!) to make them work properly. At least we don't have to do that these days... oh, wait, sorry. Ok, we do.
I read quite a bit of this but couldn't figure it out: is this writer sort of mocking their own purple prose in a sort of self-consciously over-the-top way? Or is that just their writing style? (It's hard to imagine anyone reading this style seriously. Even the subtitle, "elegant and exquisite" is a weird way to talk about software.)
Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side.
At my current job I am rewriting a 25 year-old VB application into a web-based application, and the majority* of our documentation is written in FrontPage. The horror, indeed.
*: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.
And BSD. Early on, we ran the first and largest MS FrontPage 'certified' web hosting provider, we enabled it on BSD with content in the same Unix home directories we gave our dialup clients.
Folks who made web sites in those days and paid $20/month to host them provided a pretty compelling library of content compared to today's pay-per-click 'blogosphere'.
I liked the "put up or shut up" pay-to-host model, driven by your beliefs, not your readers.
And despite the pretty garish things that happened in that web design era that FrontPage memorialized (rollover buttons!), kudos to Vermeer for democratizing web site creation.
Good point. Not a lot of people remembered that Microsoft acquired FrontPage from Vermeer in 1996 for millions. There's a pretty good old book about it "High St@kes, No Prisoners"
Well, they works best in IE because at that time there was IE only. Netscape navigator the other browser charge user, Firefox was just a beginning, as they want to take down IE because of their Navigator failure. It was great because it support some dynamic content. It was the first step to software like Dreamweaver as it bring concept in place. Having said that it was ugly design and I never like them even back then..
Netscape never charged users. Perhaps you’re thinking of Opera.
The reasons IE won over Netscape are many, but bundling with dominant OS and embracing/extending standards such that sites only worked in IE was a big part of it. Heck, there was a whole antitrust case about just that.
"Officially", Netscape had a "free trial" for 90 days. In reality, I personally don't know one person who actually paid. Some companies did buy corporate licenses.
That's been in Chrome for, like, less than a year - hardly a "long time". And the implementation leaked history spectacularly [0]. Rushing features out the door isn't necessarily something to be proud of.
Google Earth's web client (which is really the only client Google seem to care about) only works in Chrome. It's not a web client, it's a Chrome client.
I love how they laid it on the line. “If you want to do web development, you need to actually learn web technology”
Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks.....
What are newer FrontPage alternatives?
The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern website editor these days will require you to have some basic understanding of the concepts of HTML, and CSS coding, instead of the drag and drop design that FrontPage used.
Didn't require IIS, you could run it on a Linux box with Apache. It would remind you at every step that you were a second class citizen and that you really should be running IIS, but you could do it.
Those Cobalt RaQ and Qube boxes came with that support baked in, which was a nice feature until Cobalt died and we had to replicate the functionality on straight Linux boxes.
It wasn't hard, it's just that a little part of me died in side every time I had to do it.
Did you know you can still run RaQ today, on a VM. Its called BlueOnyx now, its been slightly modernized, and we have a few sites running on it to this day. Its as rock solid as ever. Have some sites that are 20 years old and were migrated from original RaQs
IIRC FrontPage written-pages and hand-written (by people actually good at it) pages looked pretty similar in-browser, but the HTML that FrontPage produced was an atrocity
My first programming job often consisted of us adding buttons and a javascript snippet to third party websites as part of the on boarding process (thinking embedding a webring script). Usually this was easy, but sometimes you'd get a FrontPage site and this simple edition would completely blow up the site.
Fortunately I usually didn't have to use front page to do it and could hand edit the HTML, if it blew up when they tried to edit it in front page again we could blame that on MS, which was believable with their software quality at the time.
> Microsoft FrontPage 98 also now provides support for the Channel Definition Format (CDF) which is a really keen way of broadcasting your web content to an end user's Windows desktop. You can "push" content to your visitors without having them seek you out daily for updates.
I love this! This is a much better example of what things were like in the early days of the internet than a lot of what I saw on the Web Design Museum (https://webdesignmuseum.org, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17891826) -- I'd completely forgotten about the tendency to use garish round images for buttons and weird fonts.
You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign.
I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?
I'm so glad we've learned these days with 10,000KB of JS for 1KB of text rendered in tiny, hairline thin fonts on no-contrast backgrounds.
It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you (interfaces like this: https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg). In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible, unappealing and awful.
Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.
Nobody was thinking this was 'web design'. You're looking at a consumer product and a specific 'novelty' theme in it. Just like nobody thought Comet Cursor was UI design.
Consider the horrible MySpace pages, or the equivalent country-specific alternatives.
It's not that web designers were bad back them, it's that a lot of this stuff was not made by designers at all, and apparently lots of people have a really bad sense of design.
I don't mean that in an elitist way. I think it's great that back then my aunt or nephew could set up a website, however horrible the design was. I'm just saying there's a reason why designers get paid to design. It's not an innate ability, and people are much worse at it than those who are into design are inclined to think.
'Decent' design is kind of a default for many other things, mostly because we often defer to 'designers' when it comes to things like furniture, clothing, etc. But make a visit to your local print shop and look at the self-made wedding invites and the like to see how bad things can be. Or consider the many self-made powerpoint presentations! It'll make your eyes burn.
> There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign.
You have to remember how primitive web technologies were in those days. CSS was released in December 1996 but didn't get good, consistent browser implementations until the early 2000s. Besides CSS your layout and styling options were frames, tables, <font> tags (and don't forget you can only use the pre-installed fonts on the user's system), or just bypassing HTML altogether by designing your page in Photoshop and exporting it as an imagemap (better hope all your users have 56k or ISDN or have lots of patience). Oh yeah, and don't forget to test your site at 640x480 with 256 colors.
> don't forget to test your site at 640x480 with 256 colors.
Don't forget: you couldn't (or shouldn't) bring your own 256 color palette, because the actual palette would be a compromise between all the applications open - so you were forced/encouraged to use the "Web palette", which contained a fixed set of 216 colors.
But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?
Form over function. Fun, original formatting was more important than coveying information well.
Keep in mind that displays sucked. Unless you had a Trinitron or similar quality display, you probably had a crappy 14" 4:3 screen with awful dot pitch, wildly inconsistent colors, part of the screen noticably fuzzier than the rest, and you likely could only have 256 colors (and your browser might not even select them optimally). You'd select a different window and the VGA palette would reset, making the now-background window look like a Pollock painting.
There was too much awful going on for people to care. Besides, the vast majority of pages were simple black text and blue links on a white background. As long as you didn't use the blink tag, nobody got upset.
> You know, good design principles weren't invented in 2006. There was plenty of good design in the 90s in other industries (publishing, newspapers, magazines, advertising, academia, ...), but apparently fucking nothing of that filtered down to webdesign.
Actually, when computers started to be used for these things, a lot of traditional media went nuts and threw out their design principles in order to take advantage of new technology.
Remind me when I get home from work tonight, and I can upload some scans of what happened to Marvel Comics letters pages, trade dress, house ads, credits/title pages, and even in some cases dialogue lettering, when they switched over to digital typesetting and color separations in late 1994/early 1995. Splashes of color and awful CGI artwork everywhere. In 1997, they switched to a retro-looking style that pulled back on most of the excesses... but it was still really gaudy compared to early 1994, and it wasn't until the 21st century that they remembered there are principles to good design.
Edit: Actually, I can show you what happened to the trade dresses now, since cover scans are widely available. Images are grabbed from https://www.mycomicshop.com
The cover of Uncanny X-Men #322, released in May 1995. Look at that CGI X! (Edit: And the teaser lettering looks like WordArt!) But they're not done experimenting yet. It gets worse. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/861739.jpg
And if you're wondering what other comics, that didn't have a recognizable symbol made out of simple shapes, used... well, let's have a look at Incredible Hulk #442, released April 1996. Yep, it's a CGI atom. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/865365.jpg
(and if you think these are bad, you should see the interiors)
But things got better, right? Well, here's Uncanny X-Men #346, released June 1997, the first month of Marvel's retro look. It's like they wanted to return to the mid-1994 look but didn't quite remember how anymore. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/844811.jpg
FrontPage 97 was the first WYSIWYG tool I ever used, since graduating from the humble text editors. IIRC, I got a free upgrade to FrontPage98. Coupled with Visual InterDev, it formed the core of my webdev workflow.
At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca. 1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it better than Fireworks; story for another day).
you were supposed to graduate from WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage, which generated utterly awful markup, to writing proper HTML yourself in a text editor
Yeah, I guess I started off the hard (wrong?) way. The first few websites I built was typed out on notepad. Progress was slow and excruciatingly difficult. Then, I discovered FrontPage and my productivity went through the roof :) Of course, the markup generated was garbage. I understood none of it and for all I knew, this was the way forward!
Actually I did this as well. I learned to code in HTML and was forced to use Dreamweaver in school because it was "faster". I could use a template and code most of what I needed to by hand faster than most other students could with the tool. I also made very clean, super fast loading sites because I tried to do everything as simple as possible. On of my final projects fell through despite me building them an entire, completely custom, hand written website that was accessible, clean, and loaded super fast. I've never thought I've had a keen eye for designing new things but I've definitely got an eye for the classics and got a lot of accolades in my class for that work.
I used Netscape’s Composer for a while, then Frontpage. It was the sheer frustration of trying to get it to do what I want that lead me into actually learning and mastering HTML.
I was told by a number of “experts” at the time that I was silly and WYSIWYGs were the way forward. It’s some 20 years later and thus far they’ve still never really worked very well. Also, man that makes me feel old.
in 1997, i had people tell me i would never be a real webmaster if I wasn't using hotdogpro. i never wanted to be a real webmaster, so I guess I dodged a bullet there.
One related tool that's often forgotten, I find, is Microsoft Publisher. Publisher 97 had an option to build and export an entire site 100% visually. I had family members use it to build their complete personal sites.
It was a pretty clever system, too. It built layouts automatically using complex tables, split out text where it could, used image maps where it had to, etc. It wasn't something you'd be proud of using but it was the fastest tool for non-technical users at the time and would probably even hold up pretty well now(!)
Oh man, I remember 'upgrading' to Publisher from FrontPage. I do agree that it was surprisingly clever at what it did, but I'm also happy I eventually learned how to write my own html/css eventually!
Dunno depends on what you like, I liked Microsoft Expression Web and that seemed to be free but they discontinued it. I would love to see VS Code become a reasonable WYSIWYG editor for Markdown and HTML5 / CSS though. I have seen some Electron based editors for Bootstrap that are very good, trick is to do an HTML WYSIWYG editor you really do need a damn browser component to do it properly enough. I would also like to see Mozilla create something similar for Firefox Developer Edition, not just more JS editors.
I was looking for that a while back, too, and a Wikipedia search led me to BlueGriffon (http://bluegriffon.org/), which (through various forks like Nvu etc.) was apparently originally based on the "Composer" part of Netscape / Mozilla.
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For programming, I used Visual Interdev which resembled Microsoft Visual Code more than Frontpage. Visual Interdev was part of the Visual Studio package.
Haven't come across that word for over ~15 years =)
What does it really mean? The term.
There are still quite a lot of them about in smaller companies - they keep Wordpress patched, post news stories, update pages etc.
I knew lots and lots of people that did.
Link to the pages you find interesting. Forget SEO. Find more pages by following recommendations. Allow ourselves to create "ugly" pages.
I think web developer or software engineer is too much, and web editor is too little
Small, random event that end up having a big effect on my life. My hobbies, what&where I chose to study, the friends I got there etc. I can trace back to this.
I'll admit, being born in 87, most of the site was simply copied from other websites about the game, and translated to Danish. So it was a decent exercise - particularly for someone dyslexic as me - to both built a website and translate from English to Danish.
If only I knew where that website ended up...
Check the generator tag on the frameset page http://www.roswithavanderzander.de/index_EN.htm
Also, it has frames, which I honestly miss even though I am glad we have moved past them.
I was like, 7, so my math skills didn’t really allow me to understand the scope of the number of pages that would be required.
But god damn if I didn’t have a blast trying.
It was complete with all the expected features of the time, including an autoplaying MIDI Pokémon background music, Comic Sans everywhere and 3D rotating text gifs made with Xara X3D. Oh and moving text in the status bar.
I'm not sorry at all though.
It had nowhere near the feature set of full-blown FrontPage, of course.
Do you think they're making fun of something?
Ah, those were the times...
Not just the ugly webpages, those were the ubiquitous style at the time. No, FrontPage pioneered deep ugliness, because like all Microsoft products of the 90s it regarded interoperability as a threat. It produces ugly HTML that works best in IE, and it has an optional upload mechanism that requires IIS on the server side.
https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/frontpage/th...
*: Well, sort of.. there are bits scattered everywhere, I had to dig into email archives to find some specifications.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/202198/how-to-insta...
Folks who made web sites in those days and paid $20/month to host them provided a pretty compelling library of content compared to today's pay-per-click 'blogosphere'.
I liked the "put up or shut up" pay-to-host model, driven by your beliefs, not your readers.
And despite the pretty garish things that happened in that web design era that FrontPage memorialized (rollover buttons!), kudos to Vermeer for democratizing web site creation.
So much time spent, as a small kid, looking for a free webhost that supported FrontPage extensions...
The reasons IE won over Netscape are many, but bundling with dominant OS and embracing/extending standards such that sites only worked in IE was a big part of it. Heck, there was a whole antitrust case about just that.
No Netscape would officially cost you US$49 until 1998.
https://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape
https://books.google.com/books?id=sjA_WJ82CSsC&lpg=PA102&dq=...
@dang can you edit/delete the parent comment? No need to spread lies here!
Just like nowadays with chrome!
- AirBnb[1]: "We'd always recommend that you use Google Chrome to browse the site: we've optimised things for this browser. Thanks."
- Seamless[2]: "Safari is not a good browser to use with our website. Google Chrome work better with our website or you can download the app."
- DirecTV Now[3]
- IDAT solutions[4] (some random thing I found while searching)
- Countfire[5] (ditto)
Groupon said something similar as well but walked it back. Whatsapp's web app didn't support Firefox initially but does now.
Could browse through Web Compat[6] as well, though I'm not sure if this site is more about sites that should work in FF but don't, or Firefox bugs.
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16805216/google-chrome-onl...
[1]: https://twitter.com/AirbnbHelp/status/752829250198245376
[2]: https://twitter.com/Seamless_Care/status/942798540396474368
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-googl...
[4]: https://www.idatsolutions.com/faq/
[5]: https://www.countfire.com/
[6]: https://webcompat.com/issues
But as of now, Chrome is and has for a long time been the only browser to support:
Shadow DOM: https://caniuse.com/#feat=shadowdomv1
Custom elements: https://caniuse.com/#feat=custom-elementsv1
CSS Paint API: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-paint-api
That's been in Chrome for, like, less than a year - hardly a "long time". And the implementation leaked history spectacularly [0]. Rushing features out the door isn't necessarily something to be proud of.
[0] https://www.spinda.net/papers/smith-2018-revisited.pdf (see section 3.1)
https://earth.google.com/web
Now if someone would tell web developers that if you want to write desktop/mobile apps, you need to learn native frameworks.....
What are newer FrontPage alternatives?
The Internet and the web have changed drastically since the days when FrontPage was a very common website editor. Almost every modern website editor these days will require you to have some basic understanding of the concepts of HTML, and CSS coding, instead of the drag and drop design that FrontPage used.
I recently found this thing called 'pinegrove editor' (I think that's' what it's called. looks the closest to something like it and modern.
maybe blue griffon.
Sadly drop and drop widgets with wordpress themes is probably the most widely used that is similar.
Those Cobalt RaQ and Qube boxes came with that support baked in, which was a nice feature until Cobalt died and we had to replicate the functionality on straight Linux boxes.
It wasn't hard, it's just that a little part of me died in side every time I had to do it.
I remember I'd use "View Source" and look for Frontpage tags as a cue for whether a site's designers deserved a good mocking
Rather than look at the actual design?
Fortunately I usually didn't have to use front page to do it and could hand edit the HTML, if it blew up when they tried to edit it in front page again we could blame that on MS, which was believable with their software quality at the time.
Just look at this page, updated LAST YEAR: http://www.telecommanderhosting.com/ec/framed_Microsoft_OS.h... Look at the waving Win 95 logo! Not to mention the "office clipart guy" in the homepage...
I am just suprised that the obligatory "under construction" gif is missing!
That rarely happened on old pages
https://www.lingscars.com/
It looks like this used to be the precursor of RSS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Definition_Format
I mean: yes, technology was limited. I get that you couldn't have free range with things like typography and that CSS wasn't a thing yet. But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking?
It's honestly always been bad ... before the web you'd dial into terminal based systems (BBS) and be assaulted with a perverse amount of ANSI escape codes and 8-bit extended ASCII flying around the screen and blinking at you (interfaces like this: https://s0.mundogamers.com/uploaded/bbsmenu.jpg). In between the two eras even IRC and UseNet got full of crufty ASCII art followed by leet-speak spelled weirdly cased words...it was illegible, unappealing and awful.
Having the maturity to know when to stop and having the control to know what not to do have always been talents far more rare than we'd prefer.
https://cleaner.ansilove.org/bbs.html
And, if you want to see a live version of a sweet looking BBS, check out this one in your telnet app:
telnet: absinthe.darktech.org:23
Nobody was thinking this was 'web design'. You're looking at a consumer product and a specific 'novelty' theme in it. Just like nobody thought Comet Cursor was UI design.
> Your developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should
As a frontend developer I'm part of it, but at least I don't encourage it or defend it :-/
It's not that web designers were bad back them, it's that a lot of this stuff was not made by designers at all, and apparently lots of people have a really bad sense of design.
I don't mean that in an elitist way. I think it's great that back then my aunt or nephew could set up a website, however horrible the design was. I'm just saying there's a reason why designers get paid to design. It's not an innate ability, and people are much worse at it than those who are into design are inclined to think.
'Decent' design is kind of a default for many other things, mostly because we often defer to 'designers' when it comes to things like furniture, clothing, etc. But make a visit to your local print shop and look at the self-made wedding invites and the like to see how bad things can be. Or consider the many self-made powerpoint presentations! It'll make your eyes burn.
You have to remember how primitive web technologies were in those days. CSS was released in December 1996 but didn't get good, consistent browser implementations until the early 2000s. Besides CSS your layout and styling options were frames, tables, <font> tags (and don't forget you can only use the pre-installed fonts on the user's system), or just bypassing HTML altogether by designing your page in Photoshop and exporting it as an imagemap (better hope all your users have 56k or ISDN or have lots of patience). Oh yeah, and don't forget to test your site at 640x480 with 256 colors.
Don't forget: you couldn't (or shouldn't) bring your own 256 color palette, because the actual palette would be a compromise between all the applications open - so you were forced/encouraged to use the "Web palette", which contained a fixed set of 216 colors.
Form over function. Fun, original formatting was more important than coveying information well.
Keep in mind that displays sucked. Unless you had a Trinitron or similar quality display, you probably had a crappy 14" 4:3 screen with awful dot pitch, wildly inconsistent colors, part of the screen noticably fuzzier than the rest, and you likely could only have 256 colors (and your browser might not even select them optimally). You'd select a different window and the VGA palette would reset, making the now-background window look like a Pollock painting.
There was too much awful going on for people to care. Besides, the vast majority of pages were simple black text and blue links on a white background. As long as you didn't use the blink tag, nobody got upset.
Actually, when computers started to be used for these things, a lot of traditional media went nuts and threw out their design principles in order to take advantage of new technology.
Remind me when I get home from work tonight, and I can upload some scans of what happened to Marvel Comics letters pages, trade dress, house ads, credits/title pages, and even in some cases dialogue lettering, when they switched over to digital typesetting and color separations in late 1994/early 1995. Splashes of color and awful CGI artwork everywhere. In 1997, they switched to a retro-looking style that pulled back on most of the excesses... but it was still really gaudy compared to early 1994, and it wasn't until the 21st century that they remembered there are principles to good design.
Edit: Actually, I can show you what happened to the trade dresses now, since cover scans are widely available. Images are grabbed from https://www.mycomicshop.com
The cover of Uncanny X-Men #315, released in June 1994 (comics are dated two months in advance). Fairly tasteful trade dress. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/639727.jpg
The cover of Uncanny X-Men #322, released in May 1995. Look at that CGI X! (Edit: And the teaser lettering looks like WordArt!) But they're not done experimenting yet. It gets worse. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/861739.jpg
The cover of Uncanny X-Men #332, released March 1996. This is peak mid-90s gaudy. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/865533.jpg
And if you're wondering what other comics, that didn't have a recognizable symbol made out of simple shapes, used... well, let's have a look at Incredible Hulk #442, released April 1996. Yep, it's a CGI atom. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/865365.jpg
Or Amazing Spider-Man #411, released March 1996. Three dimensional Spider-Man mask! https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/882953.jpg
(and if you think these are bad, you should see the interiors)
But things got better, right? Well, here's Uncanny X-Men #346, released June 1997, the first month of Marvel's retro look. It's like they wanted to return to the mid-1994 look but didn't quite remember how anymore. https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/844811.jpg
Is Bootstrap is the new Frontpage?
At the time Macromedia was making terrific advances in this space. Ca. 1999-2000 I moved to Dreamweaver, Ultradev, Flash and Paint Shop Pro(liked it better than Fireworks; story for another day).
you were supposed to graduate from WYSIWYG tools like FrontPage, which generated utterly awful markup, to writing proper HTML yourself in a text editor
All the cool kids used DreamWeaver, the hardcore ones notepad.
I was told by a number of “experts” at the time that I was silly and WYSIWYGs were the way forward. It’s some 20 years later and thus far they’ve still never really worked very well. Also, man that makes me feel old.
It was a pretty clever system, too. It built layouts automatically using complex tables, split out text where it could, used image maps where it had to, etc. It wasn't something you'd be proud of using but it was the fastest tool for non-technical users at the time and would probably even hold up pretty well now(!)