I miss the 1996-1997 type web sites. Ads and money has changed the web so much.

I recently had the idea to start a like 1994-style Yahoo-style web site that only links to sites which fulfill these conditions:

a) they have a lot of quality content

b) they only have minimal or no ads (absolutely no signups, freemium sites, 14-day trials etc).

c) no obnoxious self-advertising of a company's own brand (e.g. "Will It Blend? | Presented by Blendtec").

d) (this one is hard to quantify, but it's a kind of "I know it when I see it" thing) they were made with love and a desire to spread thoughts and creations.. rather than a desire for making money.

Obviously this directory site would not be a vehicle for making money. I also don't want this to be a hipster coolness thing. It's not the retro-ugly layouts I'm after, it's the content.

Stupid? Does it already exist?

The site that I came across that triggered this thought was http://www.americanradiohistory.com/ .

What you're talking about making is how Yahoo! started out. As a directory of the web. Curated by humans. If you start one please share a link.

"Web 1.0" sites also tend to work surprisingly well on mobile.

It's almost as if they were using a semantic markup language rather than a visual description language...

I think you've wearing some serious rose-tinted glasses if you think that web 1.0's html was more semantic focused than today's.

Even this example is full of <FONT> tags and align="center" attributes.