by panic on 5/29/25, 7:33 AM with 185 comments
by vanschelven on 5/29/25, 9:21 AM
by vr46 on 5/29/25, 10:00 AM
Nielsen I can honestly leave, maybe he did help millions of people have easier to use sites, but I found him rigid and boring; especially rigid with his prescriptive approach to sites - "the home page should have these links". I think Philip Greenspun skewered him at some point.
I understand why a lot of this was like this, as people wanted answers and direction, and were prepared to pay a lot of money for it, and he was a consultant doing consultancy. People have always wanted answers and direction, and will pay for it, but in a rapidly-changing world, the answers have a short shelf-life. Maybe that's why he took his site down a long time ago, aware that his maps were getting very out-of-date.
Still, fun times, what a great age it was.
by Brajeshwar on 5/29/25, 8:59 AM
I’m today years old, realizing that Jeffrey Zeldman was 40+ in 1997. I always thought he was kinda just a few years older than us in the early 2000s.
“View Source” of their websites was an educational time well spent. Warning: In some regions, “View Source” may be illegal. Please use it at your own discretion.
Starting my career in the early 2000s, and my design and other Flash Works were on the Internet - Zeldman, Siegel, and a lot of others were the heroes. Nielsen was the villain. By the mid-2000s, I had done extensive work for clinics and physicians, delving into accessibility, HIPAA compliance, and other related areas. By then, Nielsen and the likes became the heroes. :-)
by donatj on 5/29/25, 12:15 PM
Now there's rarely anything neat, and when there is you can poke around with the inspector but it's likely buried deep in some obfuscated JS you'll never decipher.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 5/29/25, 9:14 AM
I learned quite a bit from that book. I think Flanders may still have a site. I was on his mailing list, but I haven’t heard anything for the last decade or so.
by theGeatZhopa on 5/29/25, 8:43 AM
by whalesalad on 5/29/25, 8:49 AM
I got star struck one day when Zeldman emailed me asking for an enhancement to a WordPress plugin I had created. Felt like I’d come full circle.
by tunnuz on 5/29/25, 2:06 PM
by tclancy on 5/29/25, 12:16 PM
by rglover on 5/29/25, 7:51 PM
Will never forget learning HTML + CSS by reading these guys books and constantly refreshing forums like Designer's Talk.
by eadmund on 5/29/25, 1:41 PM
Oddly enough, I much prefer it to the corporate NNGroup site. And that last version reminds me a bit of HN itself. Simple, clean and usable — really simple, really clean and really usable, not mindlessly aping a trend (and getting it wrong) but intelligently setting its own trend.
I wish more sites adopted that style of design.
by gdubs on 5/29/25, 2:30 PM
Some point along the way I lost my copy of HotWired Style: Principles of Web Design – so I picked up a new one. It's an amazing time capsule of what that time was like, and even if the technology has changed it's still so interesting to me from a standpoint of working within constraints, and understanding a new medium for itself rather than just as a thing to host the previous medium.
by oldpersonintx2 on 5/29/25, 9:19 AM
people now don't seem to appreciate how much Google's radically simple homepage changed the web
look at web design right before Google took off - it was always about adding more to the page, and most sites were a mess
Larry and Sergey showed that radical simplicity was literally worth a trillion dollars
by Maro on 5/29/25, 1:44 PM
by ngneer on 5/29/25, 12:04 PM
This article reminds me of "A List Apart". That website is still running, incidentally.
by krupan on 5/29/25, 7:07 PM
by cloudpushers on 5/29/25, 7:12 PM
Perhaps Nielsen's practices will enjoy a resurgence as it's easier to make personal sites for all sorts of different, non-commercial entities and happenings.
by subpixel on 5/29/25, 1:44 PM
That is a funny way to not mention that he is a hard-core climate change denialist.
by H1Supreme on 5/29/25, 7:30 PM
There was a network of sites (like those mentioned above), that had feeds of interesting work done on the web. Much of it was purely an exercise in creativity. The single 1024x768 resolution target let folks go wild without the constraints of responsiveness that we see today.
While I realize that the web had to evolve, I have a lot of nostalgia for web design from those days. The "design" part of it was really centered around artistic expression, and still had a lot of influence from graphic design.
by rkaregaran on 5/29/25, 4:39 PM
by tiffanyh on 5/29/25, 2:08 PM
by qgin on 5/29/25, 6:12 PM
by telesilla on 5/29/25, 1:26 PM
The instant marker of my generation
by dbg31415 on 5/29/25, 4:23 PM
by yarone on 5/29/25, 10:00 PM
by alphadelphi on 5/29/25, 9:59 AM
by erikig on 5/29/25, 3:34 PM
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/df/Designi...
by atum47 on 5/30/25, 2:15 AM
I made a fan website for the movie Matrix, I wish I could see it today. It was awesome. Lots and lots of effects.
by rchaud on 5/29/25, 12:19 PM
by jongjong on 5/29/25, 9:41 PM
Reading this article reminds me of how many opportunities there were to build useful tools and quickly gain traction and grow a community. Nowadays everything including people's attention has been monopolized and growing a community is not feasible for everyone. This rubs salt into the wound that it's also much harder to create viable, differentiated products due to high competition.
by levmiseri on 5/29/25, 3:20 PM
Sometimes I wonder how I (or generally people of that time) would react to seeing the modern web. At least — the 'good' modern web and design. Awe? Confusion? Understanding that this is the future in the very same way that we understand that 'that' was the past?
by KaiserPro on 5/29/25, 8:00 PM
The killer was the iphone not being powerful enough/having enough ram to run the plugin, and adobe refusing to make concessions.
What it got right:
Design once, looks the same anywhere
reasonably powerful scripting language
Vectors as a first party drawing primitive
abstracted OS hooks
This was it's downfall, because it was for the time heavy to run. Combined with advertisers wanting rich flashy adverts, meant it became the bane of people's life.
There is still no replacement that is easy to author, and works pretty much anywhere. Sure there are loads of JS frameworks that sorta do one part of what flash did, but none of them have the rich editor that allowed you to have such creative freedom.
The closest thing to it now is unity.
by mgr86 on 5/29/25, 1:41 PM
I really looked to him at that time. I would sneak away during lunch my senior year of high school to read his new Web Standards book. I still regularly check A list Apart, albeit its seldom updated these days. But his approach melded nicely with the other things from XML land I had been reading at the time.
by dzink on 5/30/25, 2:41 AM
by bluenose69 on 5/29/25, 10:16 AM
A big annoyance of the early web was all the stupid blinking text and pointless little animations. Luckily we've moved past them. Of course, today it's all about ads, which is the tip of a spear that is quite unpleasant.
Plus ça change.
by hbarka on 5/29/25, 11:36 AM
by ExMachina73 on 5/29/25, 2:22 PM
by 90s_dev on 5/29/25, 3:35 PM
It must have been released around 1995 or so. It used Mosaic browser throughout all the examples, which looked so different than the IE3 that I was using. There was a heavy focus on forms and controls. And it was hundreds of pages. Familiar to anyone?
by adregan on 5/29/25, 1:34 PM
I try not to profess in mixed company that young designers should know the history of the web (it’s so young after all!), lest I be pegged an old man yelling at clouds. However, there was a time when there was a really interesting intersection of print designers coming to work on the nascent web, asking for the moon, and web developers teasing out compromises because the platform was so limited. Now that the platform is so capable that it could accomplish those designs, we don’t have designers capable of imagining it.
I’d love for a designer to ask me to do something different for a change of pace. There have been many neat APIs that have slowly made their way to CSS over the years sitting unused.
by JimDabell on 5/29/25, 10:55 AM
> Note that the typical display size at the time was 800x600 pixels, so this and other websites would likely have been designed for those dimensions.
This was before responsive design existed. First we designed for 640×480, then we designed for 800×600, then we designed for 1024×768. Bad developers would design for wider viewports and leave people with smaller screens to scroll horizontally to see everything. Slightly better designers would design for the narrower viewports and leave huge gutters down either the right side or both sides for people with wider screens. Best practice was “fluid design”, where you would define widths in percentages to adapt to the screen width, but it was difficult to get designers on board.
> But if the web was a “consumer playground” now, it was still one with many constraints. As Zeldman told budding web designers, “the accepted wisdom is to use as few images as possible, and make them as small as you can (small in file size, though not necessarily in height or width).”
It wasn’t just file size. The early web was limited in terms of colours too. There were 216 “web safe” colours.
> the book advocated for “hacks” to HTML in order to make websites more visually appealing. The primary hacks were using invisible tables and single-pixel GIFs to help control layout.
There were a lot of weird hacks. One was to put many <title> elements in your document, and Netscape 2 would flip between them in the window’s title bar to make a crude animation. The title bar because browsers didn’t have tabs back then.
> CSS support from the two main browsers at the start of 1997 was patchy at best. Internet Explorer 3.0 was the closest to supporting the W3C standard for CSS, but it was buggy and inconsistent.
It was basically nonexistent apart from very minor things. Internet Explorer 3 didn’t even understand the em unit and just treated it as pixels, so if you set something to font-size: 1.5em, it wasn’t 50% larger than the parent element’s text, it was invisibly small.
> As for Netscape, its 3.0 browser had poor CSS support. In fact, the company even tried to create an alternative to CSS, with a JavaScript-powered styling mechanism called JavaScript-Based Style Sheets (JSSS).
Netscape 4 transcoded CSS to JSSS on the fly, which had the side-effect that when you disabled JavaScript, it also disabled CSS.
> For all their differences, CSS and Flash did have similar goals: both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web.
Before web fonts were supported by browsers, one fairly common technique was sIFR, which looked for specially marked up text on the page and replaced the text with Flash applets rendering the text in an embedded font. It was pretty ugly loading and caused bunch of problems, but the designers didn’t mind as long as it let them use custom fonts.
It was a pretty hellish time to be a web developer, but exciting as well. The browser bugs and incompatibilities were a thousand times worse than they are today and could really ruin multiple days at a time on the most trivial stuff, but it was also a period of great inventiveness and variety.
by absurdo on 5/29/25, 1:45 PM
by mjaniczek on 5/29/25, 10:57 AM
by replwoacause on 5/29/25, 4:37 PM
by djtriptych on 5/30/25, 4:27 AM
by WorldPeas on 5/29/25, 8:18 PM
by t1234s on 5/29/25, 6:25 PM
by fitsumbelay on 5/29/25, 3:22 PM
by p3rls on 5/30/25, 11:51 AM
by plun9 on 5/29/25, 11:25 AM
