>While I agree with the sentiment, I loathe these "retro" websites that don't actually look like how most websites looked back then.

Countless websites on Geocities and elsewhere looked just like that. MY page looked like that (but more edgy, with rotating neon skull gifs). All those silly GIFs were popular and there were sites you could find and download some for personal use.

>It's like how people remember the 80s as neon blue and pink when it was more of a brownish beige.

In North Platte or Yorkshire maybe. Otherwise plenty of neon blue and pink in the 80s. Starting from video game covers, arcades, neon being popular with bars and clubs, far more colorful clothing being popular, "Memphis" style graphic design, etc.

The brown, beige, and dark orange were extremely prevalent in the 80s --- but a lot of that was a result of the fact that most things in your environment are never brand new; the first half of the 80s was mostly built in the second half of the 70s.

> don't actually look like how most websites looked back then

https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/

> was more of a brownish beige.

Did you never watch MTV?

This look with animations and bright text on dark repeated backgrounds was definitely popular for a while in the late 90s. You wouldn’t see it on larger sites like Yahoo or CNN, but it was definitely not unheard of for personal sites.

Gray backgrounds where also popular, with bright blue for unvisited links and purple for visited links. IIRC this was inspired by the default colors of Netscape Navigator 2.

> IIRC this was inspired by the default colors of Netscape Navigator 2.

"Inspired" is an interesting word for "didn't set custom values." And I believe Mosaic used the same colors before. I'm not even sure when HTML introduced the corresponding attributes (this was all before CSS ...)

Now that you mention it, something did seem a little off about the thinking-butt emoji...

You’re right, there isn’t even any marquee or blinking text

A marquee, animated work-in-progress GIF and a visit counter CGI would have nailed it.

My old website from the 90s looks disturbingly similar to this one.

Exactly.

If there is no white 1x1 pixel that is stretched in an attempt to make something that resembles actual layout, or multiple weird tables, I always ask: are they even trying.

In all seriousness- they got quite a good run with xslt. Time to let it rest.

1x1 pixels for padding and aligning? That came later. Your memory is off.

In the 90s, sites did kinda look like that.

1x1 pixels for padding and aligning were absolutely a thing in the late 90s (1997+). Don't know what alternative history you have in mind, but it was used at the "table layout" era.

What came later was the float layout hell- sorry, "solution".

The 1x1 pixel gif hack arrived shortly after Netscape 1.1 introduced tables. I belive this was before colored text and tiled backgrounds became available. So the hack is definitely part of the “golden age” of web design.

Could just be the author’s personal style?

I once got into a cab in NYC on Halloween and the driver said to me, hey, you really nailed that 80s hairstyle, thinking I had styled it for Halloween. I had to tell him dude, I’m from the 80s.

> it was more of a brownish beige.

Bleed through from the 70s

Maybe not most, but there were plenty of black/blue/dark sites.

Well, the page don't tell anything about it's style, so all these impressions are really what people interpret.