Indeed, your statement may be unpopular, but I would laugh this off in a similar manner. After spending reasonable amount of time in my life creating websites, designs (for print and web) with every technology you can imagine - from REX BBS scripts to ES6, SVG and WebGL these days, I can boldly state that these people had absolutely no clue what they been doing on the WEB. Perhaps they were the top designers for print, which was commendable, but web is not print.
They did not understand this new medium, the screen, and the fact you don't have to put all the information on the same page. It was not until 2010 perhaps, when things started to flatten and simplify again, that people actually started doing reasonable web design. Usability was a new thing even in 2005, and Apple with their K-12 interfaces did not help this much, even though certain design decisions on System OSs make a lot of sense. But this was not the web.
Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated. This is the same for cartography, btw, where things move even slower, and we still getting maps overloaded with information like its 1834.
IMHO, and this may be super unpopular, but game designers and game UI designers served as much more substantial inspiration for the web, rather than these early over-hyped designers, which otherwise did great job for posters and print. Some games are so forward-thinking, and so beautiful in the simplicity of their interfaces, that we can really argue most of the world got where gamers (and demosceners!) already have been for years.
There are elements of truth in your comment, but it just seems weirdly derisive. The way the web evolved to where it is now happened in a similar fashion to games, through gradual improvement of the underlying platform and people try to do anything and everything with it before it was formally capable of doing it in a standardized way.
> Most of what these books teach is how to get the illustrator/coreldaw/quarkr approach and slap it on top of a webpage. How very little people experimented with the widgets already available to them such as pages, buttons, etc, the fact that it can show little, but be navigated.
People experimented plenty, but print was the start and ultimately those were the tools available at the time, and they were ahead of what the web was actually capable of. At a certain point, pushing the limits meant figuring out how to make rounded corners without rounded corner support or css, how to load images optimally, or debug. Game devs and porn industry absolutely pushed it past those limits, but also hardware got better, standards evolved. Many barely distinguishable bits of underlying primitive tech powers this website, and many others power YouTube, and Zoom, Gmail. It pretty much took until now to come up with decent design tools that sufficiently deal with designing for the complexity of the web.
I never said it didnt take time to mature, neither did I say standards were okay from day one. but actually some were.
Tables and buttons were working from day one, and there was a lot one could do images also, spacer.gif including, should you understand design enough and the new medium. JS sizing of elements was available very early on, even before CSS was a thing for all I remember. The widgets and controls were more than enough for many apps.
Sorry, didnt want to sound derisive, but these people cited with the books did design without using the medium's potential, because for them all it was - a sceen. And many people have recognized this lack of underrstanding, not only myself. The sad part is these guys who had no clue about the programming side of the web were touted the gurus, while some early web/dev/ux guys were not given air time for not having enough design elements.
Even with all the vaporwave nostalgia, we have to admit many, if not the majority of 90s pages, were over-designed, over-complicated, and overloading the user cognitively. A classmate once blatantly stated - the web is too colorful to me, I get easily lost.
Man, I have ADHD and get easily lost, but am used to all this, but man, was he prepared for it - not at all. Many of these old pages were not even aesthetically nice, due to this over-complexity, and those guys contributed to this initial notion of having to over-complicate the web.
ASCII text clutter on the terminals pales in comparison.