 |
|
|
To My Heart's Content
I was recently asked to name my favorite and most frequented Web sites. Favorite and frequented aren't always the same, and in recent months the oft-visited sites have outnumbered the most favored, mostly because I've come to regard the Web more as a tool and less as a wonder. These days, if you were to monitor my Internet access, you'd find me paying my bills at Bank of America, picking Pulitzer Prize winners at Amazon, ordering sandwiches from Webvan and Kozmo, and watching my stocks drop at E-Trade. It's not a terribly interesting list, but it's the standard diet for 2000: high on commerce, low on content.
After realizing this, I decided to rekindle some of the excitement I felt back in my "aimless Web surfing" days by looking for engaging, content-based sites. After browsing Salon, Slate, and Word for a while, I was still feeling dissatisfied so I searched Google for "Personal Home Pages." In 1994 and '95, personal home pages were a tribute to the innovation and freedom of the Web. They were where people first used tables for positioning and single-pixel images for spacing, where Webmasters experimented with unusual navigation schemes, and where baring one's soul became widely accepted. I figured if there was innovation to be found on the Web, it would be on the personal pages hosted at various universities. I worked my way through 50 randomly selected sites, and what I saw was depressing. It was as if personal Web pages had never progressed—they had, in fact, regressed. There were no tricks, no creative use of HTML, no clever visual designs.
|
|
|
