...Not.
Every website just looks like this now. Yawn. What the hell happened?
Every website worth its salt has this samey look now. I don't know. It's probably just Current Year Trendsâ„¢.
Rose-tinted glasses
There has always been a thing that defines a given era. Gratuitous usage of <iframe>, <blink>, <marquee> and <table> for the late 90s-early 2000s Geocities era. Design-based websites and the gradient-laden revolution for Web 2.0 and the late 2000s. And now, stylish, humanist, minimalist, flat trends for the 2010s and into the 2020s.
Even so, there has always been some people that stand out and do things differently. When the rose-tinted glasses are on, I'd say the past had more in terms of originality.
Though, most of the websites are really just the same old animated gifs, dividers, tiled wallpaper, background MIDI, Times New Roman. The cheesiest possible crap you can ever put on a webpage. That's probably what we all thought the web was good for.
Some took the web a little more seriously and you have imagemaps and neat retro landing pages that have 90s CG and some links on the navbar. Some of the designs still kind of hold up today, if not for a font change.
Today, I feel things are getting more "generic". Monetization are now the main goal of everything, and so creativity is sort of stifled in favor of profit and conformity. My_Space died and YouTube spins a worse layout every few years. And then there's this visual style. It's kind of the perfect form of generic stuff that everyone wants to use. Everyone loves this, so everyone uses this.
Not only does this happen to the Web. We get these boring-ass, samey-looking bitcoin ransom crap everywhere. Big money's the name of the game. Whatever happened to the fires that used to be thrown around on our desktops? At least Rensenware and Petya brought some kind of class.
Back to the Web. Everything also feels less "sovereign". Everyone relies on outside CDNs. Makes for easy code copypasting and saves on bandwidth. Downside is, it's centralization. CDN down, you and everyone else are screwed. Oh yeah, CDNs can track you, too.
I've been hearing horror stories of modern automation, advertising, tracking, and algorithms. Here's another one: Data consumption.
That was easy.
WYSIWYG web generators and templates have been around since forever. And they have always been a pain and a blessing.
Anyone who knows HTML may have their eyes bleed out just by looking at the source code of a WYSIWG-generated page. Formatting spam. Incorrectly placed elements. Meta spam. Page generator trash. Manual positioning hell. FrontPage and (Netscape|Seamonkey) Composer suffers from this. Publisher is even worse. *shudders*
Fast forward to present day, and there's now metric tons of JavaScript vomit. Minified, it's near epileptic to anyone daring to look more than the visuals at surface level. Who the hell even knows what happens there. Coupled with today's visual style, it's pretty ironic. The design says "minimalist" but it takes a century to load. And maxes out your CPU. Have fun listening to CPU fans inside your computer whirring up.
I'm a little scared of WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. But idk, what better way to deal with this? Well, the editor I'm using to make this runs on a tree-model inspired by the very HTML code I'm writing indirectly. I think that's okay. But the thing is, the editor is sort of a snorty freeware and will jam its tag, probably even in the Pro version. Good thing I know HTML. But lots of people don't. 😞
Why is my browser running so shitty and my fans running like hell?
Because I've got a video running down below.
