The 1990s were an impressive decade for technology. The personal computer was finally a reality, and with the internet becoming faster and more impressive each month, every wanted one. And with the internet came advances in web browsers and HTML. In the mid to late 1990s HTML code was growing faster than standards could control them, and each and every browser had new flashier tags like marquee, blink, and the dreaded embedded MIDI files. Any amateur could make a webpage now, and odds are it would be painful on your eyes and ears.
Fortunately people have begun to realize that if a user can't stand to look at your page, no one will visit it. Sleek, modern, and easy to use are the keys to a successful website today. Unfortunately, there are remnants of the old internet still floating around. Scmieg has found several webpages that still engage in the horrific practice of subjecting their visitors to embedded MIDIs. He has taken these webpages and engaged in a good bit of appropriation to create a webpage that embodies these old practices. He has taken the music and several images directly from his sources then, on a familiarly awkward background, scrolls the images across the page, plays the music, and provides the information on the webpage it was all taken from in appropriately painful to read text.
Overall I find this piece to be a hilarious commentary on how far we have come in terms of web development. Everything we see in his piece was (unfortunately) once a standard online, and is now (fortunately) virtually extinct from most common webpages. Templates, styling, and an appreciation of standards have reined in the wild days of awkwardly positioned neon headers, but Schmieg's piece reminds us how far we have come, and why we never want to go back.
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