As a piece written in 2005, I found that ‘Vernacular Web’ reflected thoughtfully on a transition that occurred throughout the dot.com boom into the late 2000s. Before the early 2000s that saw the creation of automated drag and drop tools like WIX, Wordpress, and Weebly, amateur web designers took advantage of the nascent design scene. For example, Lialina writes “There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break.”
Throughout the piece, there’s a sense of how malleable the web is, in contrast to how standardized it has become, echoing the previous ‘Internet Atlas’ reading of a landscape largely shaped by big players in tech and media. The so-called slippery slope described in the previous reading is more gentle and less dubious in this reading, as the web underwent a process of displaying its “undergoing construction phase”.
In many ways, the web is still under construction, but previous features such as the “W3C” certificate buttons are no longer on display, and the once distracting and shiny bullets have adjusted to a more minimalist style. Interestingly, Lialina also writes about how the culture of the web was different then, favoring open feedback from visitors to people’s sites. There would be an option to email at the bottom, as these sites largely belonged to amateurs who could be reached directly, unlike contacting customer service at many sites nowadays.
Amusingly, the idea of a “welcome page” has largely disappeared, demonstrating how the infrastructure and design of sites has evolved with our capabilities to change them. Ultimately, Lialina’s observations describe a larger irony into how the web is becoming more diverse (in its portrayal of languages, keyboards, frameworks) and simultaneously smaller (through standardization, losing links due to search engines, et cetera).