The early (graphical) Internet was black text on grey background with blue links and no images.
Myspace and Geocieties were already a couple of generation on from that, and ... frankly kind of a mess.
For the most part, I vastly prefer the Reader View rendering of websites over whatever's native. Design gets in the way of many things, including robustness and resilience over time (what happens when all those dependencies and embedded resources go away and/or are replace by pr0n, crypto miners, phishing, and/or surveillance payloads?), and simple legibility.
It's the exceedingly rare instance where "interactive" pages provide any additional information or capabilities, and virtually all of those are specialised one-offs. I'm thinking of several of the xkcd specials, or the work of Bret Victor or Nicky Case. I'm sorely hard pressed to think of any others. Mainstream pubs (notably the NY Times) are far worse for their efforts in this space.
Myspace and Geocieties were already a couple of generation on from that, and ... frankly kind of a mess.
For the most part, I vastly prefer the Reader View rendering of websites over whatever's native. Design gets in the way of many things, including robustness and resilience over time (what happens when all those dependencies and embedded resources go away and/or are replace by pr0n, crypto miners, phishing, and/or surveillance payloads?), and simple legibility.
It's the exceedingly rare instance where "interactive" pages provide any additional information or capabilities, and virtually all of those are specialised one-offs. I'm thinking of several of the xkcd specials, or the work of Bret Victor or Nicky Case. I'm sorely hard pressed to think of any others. Mainstream pubs (notably the NY Times) are far worse for their efforts in this space.