That's an interesting idea. There's something very raw about those university.edu/department/~username pages that existed with the most basic of HTML--unstyled tables, blue anchor links, images only when you needed them, and almost no Yavascript.

That rawness, without too many attribute tags let alone CSS, is brutalist.

Olia Lialina has a great piece about the aesthetics of "Prof. Dr. Style": http://contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/

Thanks for this link! Never knew someone gave this "style" a name. (And an apt one to boot)

Btw, the university pages you mention are still extremely common, at least in mathematics-related fields

When I'm searching for info on something, if I land on a page with no styling and no multimedia beyond hypertext and images, I know I've hit something good because it's almost certainly an academic's personal page!

Yep, "existed" is the wrong tense. My university's entire CS and Engineering schools run on those style of pages.

I think you're giving early web "design" far too much credit. To say something is "brutalist" describes an intentional aesthetic - early pages really where purely functional, and any aesthetic flourishes really were limited by the technology despite aspirations to design something beautiful (whatever that means).

Fair point. I didn't mean to imply it was an intentional design choice, just that it was "selected for" by the "nature" of the platform (ha!). And with regard to "beauty", I just meant that it was almost elegant in a way that modern design tries to do away with.

For instance, if a site didn't have a proper search function, but had a pretty logical URL scheme, you could often find what you need by trying a few permutations in the address bar. The limitations of the system meant web "designers" (I'm using that term loosely) had to build fairly organized and unintentionally "Brutalist" sites if they wanted to be used by any large number of people.

Hope that made sense, I'm still waiting for my coffee to kick in.