Vernacular web

This is the web as ordinary people built it between roughly 1994 and 2001, before design was a job that the web had. Pages were centred because centring was the easy tag. Backgrounds were tiled because a small image repeated was cheap. Type was whatever the browser had, so Times and Comic Sans and Courier appeared in the same paragraph. Rules were the chiselled grey default. Decoration came from free clip art: spinning envelopes, sparkling dividers, dancing babies, flame bullets, a yellow road sign saying the site was under construction. The furniture was social rather than commercial: a guestbook, a hit counter, a webring strip at the foot, a midi file starting on load, an email address written out in full.

The name comes from Olia Lialina, whose essay A Vernacular Web treated these pages as a folk idiom rather than as bad design, and read their conventions the way you would read the conventions of a handmade sign. The argument that stuck is that the style was honest about its author. Every choice was made by a person with no training, no toolkit, and no template, working in whatever editor they had, and the resulting page said things about them that a professional page cannot. When GeoCities was shut down in 2009 a large part of that record went with it, which is why the surviving archives are treated as an archaeological site.

The distinction to hold onto is between this and retro web design. The vernacular web is the original, made sincerely, by people who wanted a marquee and had no idea it would later be a joke. Retro web design is the deliberate revival: a designer in the present choosing beveled grey buttons and a hit counter, with full knowledge of how they read, usually for a portfolio, a music project, or a brand that wants to seem handmade. The parts list overlaps almost exactly. What differs is intent, and it shows in the execution, since the homage is nearly always tidier, better aligned, and more restrained than anything the era actually produced.

Borrowing it in a product means borrowing an argument, that this place is personal, small, and not corporate. The parts that carry that reading without hurting anyone are the tiled background, the centred masthead, the visible link colours, the guestbook, and the counter. The parts to leave in 1998 are the ones the era got wrong for real reasons: audio that starts by itself, text over a background tile with no contrast to speak of, animated GIFs that never stop and that WCAG asks you to stop after five seconds, and layouts held together by tables that no screen reader can make sense of. The affection is worth keeping; the accessibility record is not.