I was inspired to search for my old home pages, but the only one I can remember (dinerwaitress’ guitar tab on geocities) is gone. I do remember learning to hand-code HTML on Angelfire in the mid-90s by changing little sections of the indecipherable text onscreen to see what it did, and the little tiny notebook where I wrote hex color codes, frequently-used tags, and where to find my favorite clip art. And yes, I had an “under construction” sign, although if memory serves me correctly, I actually had rotating barber-striped black and yellow bar gifs.

I remember chatting online with strangers (Keri, if you’re reading this, do you remember SugarMagnolia?) and trying to figure out something about them via their home page. Things really haven’t changed, have they?

Like everything else, this has come back around to my age. I’m coming to terms with the metal bands I grew up with playing on the classic rock stations, but I somehow wasn’t ready for the original, tacky web designs of my youth to come back into vogue. I know now how my mom felt when my classmates were wearing bell bottoms.

In a bigger sense, what does this mean for the technology age gap? If fashion trends resurface every other generation, is the lifespan of the internet generation as short as 5 years?

And what of elements outside of design? What about content? In the old days (when I walked uphill barefoot both ways to a computer with internet access, I know), you typed in a site and surfed the web from there by clicking a link, from there another link, and so on. Surfing gave way to googling, but that trend seems to be reversing also. Blogrolls abound, as do link pages, and a good portion of traffic in the blogosphere is from pingbacks and trackbacks. Once separated by a common search engine, we appear to be coming back together into a tighter-knit web. Even the dreaded web directories appear to be returning, although in a much better form.

We’ll probably never know whether the return to web 1.0 is due to the influx of amateurs on myspace, the overwhelming lack of quality search engine content*, or the nostalgia of a bunch of washed-up 0.1 hackers. I’m fairly certain we’ll be witness to a bunch of office-chair philosophers blogging about it, though.

*Let’s face it, if I want to find a new [insert random string of words here] to read on a regular basis, I’m going to check with sites/blogs I already read to see what they’re reading before I spend the time sifting through search results.