GSBot

Before there was anything today's Internet users would think of as "web design," there was GeoCities. The homepage service that let absolutely anyone try his or her hand at putting something on the Internet is also one of the cradles of contemporary Web Fugly. In fact, Fugly Friday owes such a debt to the GeoCities aesthetic that this week's installment is going to take a trip down memory lane to look at some early innovations in tearing a human being's eye out using pure HTML.

Today's fugly site, HTML Advanced Tricks & Tips, is a cookbook for everything that make GeoCities sites painful to look at. Tables! Frames! Scrolling marquee text! I will grant you that some people continue to defend tables to this day, but I don't think anyone is defending those animated flame GIFs. Good luck navigating this page by clicking on the text: it's not linked. You're not going anywhere unless you click on those dancing flames. Maybe that's a secret you learn from the "HTML Writer's Guild" once they give you a cool badge like the one on this homepage.

As for the tips themselves? Closing your tags is still decent advice, and cropping and shrinking your graphics was a necessity back in the low-bandwidth heyday of GeoCities. These tips were actually not terrible at the time, but the author has to mess it up by slapping on animated GIFs and encouraging the use of the marquee tag. Between those two, we've covered most of what made every GeoCities page so terrible. Add an autoplaying midi and you'd have a Fugly Tutorial Trifecta.

(This post was made possible by Reocities, a GeoCities rescue attempt that backed up 600,000 pages of potential fugly before Yahoo! shut off GeoCities' animated flashing lights for good.)Fugly Friday: Geocities Memorial Edition originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.







Sponsored Topics: GeoCities - HTML - Yahoo - Download Squad - Graphics Interchange Format