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.