I started this page on October 5, 2022, the first day of the class Traditions and Revolutions in Web Design...
1993
... by modifying the code of a very old but still actual page made by Univ.-Prof.i.R. Dr. sc. nat.Werner Römisch. His page is one of the brightest examples in my essay Prof.Dr.Style, that can be helpful if you want to know how did people make pages in 1993 and what did it mean for them and for the evolution of web design.
So, the task was to make a page as if you are in 1993.
web ring
I sit next to Luis Weiler I linked to him and ask him to link to the next student. We are 14 people, and the last one is supposed to link back to me, in the best traditions of web rings, that as a phenomenom appeared a year or two later, but it is important to get a feeling of linking to each other.
connecting to today
I've also suggested to the students to embed a youtube video into their pages.
There was no Youtube in 1993 of course, even EMBED tag was not invented yet, but I think pulling parts of a giant system into your modest page is a nice feeling and a healthy exercise.
"HTML energy"
One week later (October 22) our group met again to find ourselves in 1995.This time the task was to style with pure HTML, which means to forget that there is CSS -- separation of style and structure, presentation and content. How to make layout and visual effects without CSS and without images? Many things are possible, but you need to go to the quirks_mode.
I made a screencast of students' works, you can acces live versions from their own home pages.
(October 27) I'm going to open this page during my talk "Welcome to My Metaverse" at Kikk festival as an example of how to build the simpliest page yourself. And how you can continue to travel in time and space
"GeoCities 1996"
Next two classes we spent diving into One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, admiring easthetics of amateur web and talking about philosophy behind eclectic style, outerspace motives, under construction culture; and how it happened that within a decade "my" became "me".
The task was to create a page in techniques, aesthetics or spirit of the first webmasters.
I made a screencast of students' works, you can acces live versions from their own home pages.
Here is my own home page, a tribute to the aerly web set makers of the late 90's.
CSS Zen
(November 9) To finish our excursus in pre-history or real history of web design, we explored the moment in the early 2000's when CSS started to to take over the field.
For me this turn is forever connected with CSS Zen Garden, the web site that gloryfied unlimited possibilities CSS could bring. The website itself was growing through contributions of many web designers who applyed different styles to the given HTML file. (It's really sad that only a few of those experiments are still online.)
Anyway, on a smaller scale, we repeated the exercise by applying two different styles to our default index.htm: "minimalistic" and "wild"
It resulted into 2 new web rings: new.html and new2.html