Yeah, to my surprise there's a lot that I actually miss about that era.

I don't really miss the graphical excess of trying to make one's site look like a Starcraft map, but even when that graphical excess existed it was sort of a thin veneer atop good old raw plain fast HTML. As opposed to today's sites, which download and JIT megabytes of Javascript before they're ready to respond to a single click, and have often invented their own bizarre UI patterns.

It's odd how right after that era the design stuff we're getting nostalgic about was derided more often than not. Is that something you remember as well? It's not that it was pointed out as being terrible and nasty like, let's say Geocities or MySpace type pages, but I know there was a drastic shift and unlike most trends it hasn't seemed to loop back on the internet of all places where things seem to cycle back into popularity faster than something like fashion? Maybe that's my personal perception but it feels at least somewhat correct.

> it was sort of a thin veneer atop good old raw plain fast HTML

Yes, I loved that too! It felt like you actually had a handle on everything your website was doing and was comprised of. There wasn't anything involve with it that you just installed and assumed would work. Each decision and technology was something you knew inside and out and employed specifically.

Things these days are crazy, eh? Maybe it's a bigger combination of that part of it plus the fact that it looked the way that I described that creates the fuzzy feelings? Well, if I ever get around to doing what I said above I'll have some sort of answer, haha.

I do think that mid-2000s "web 2.0" era that came after the era of shiny pipes and stuff.

The "web 2.0 era" was pretty good. There was a doubling down on semantic HTML, sharing data via RSS, etc. The first cross browser JS frameworks began to pop up which allowed everybody write JS once that would work mostly everywhere.

During that era there was definitely a lot of derision of that late "web 1.0" era with the superduper photoshop-image-slice-heavy rendered pipes and stuff UIs. At its worst a lot of it fundamentally broke basic web functionality like bookmarking and such. The derision was probably justified, since it actually sort of sucked when the whole web looked and worked like that.

HOWEVER, like you I am nostalgic for some of that excess! I like it better than a lot of today's web!