Modernisation of the Internet

[GMH]

The Internet has officially been with us now for about a decade if not a little longer, and looking around it's very interesting to look at websites that have not been updated for many years (last updated July 1997 or something like that). What stands out with older webpages, from before 2000 is the fact that the pages seemed to be more simpler i.e. some text, a few hyperlinks and one or two pictures and nothing else more. Now we are more likely to see animations, film clips and other stuff that we probably wouldn't have imagined five years ago. Is it just a fact that technology is getting greater when it comes to developing websites on the Internet and also when some people see a webpage that has not been updated for many years, do they start to see the signs of the webpage being dated from a 2006 perspective?

[undercovers]

its broadband that has made these advances possible - in the old days web sites had to stay simple to get the info loaded quickly... i sort of miss the old day as i simply hate a web that has loads of moving images and flashing banners all over the place.

[jenstar]

I agree - animations especially are very annoying. And sites that are done in Flash when there's absolutely no need, which means it takes ten times as long to load and is much harder to navigate than a straight HTML page.

[fo3nix]

GMH: What you're talking about is the web, but the internet is a lot more than that, and has been around far longer than a decade.

And as undercovers says, it's just that people can load content faster, so content providers can provide more heavyweight (i.e. animation, movie clips) content.

Also as you say, technology has improved. If you go and watch a movie trailer hosted by Apple, chances are it'll be encoded with H.264 for Quicktime. This has only been out about a year, but provides good quality visuals with a smaller download size. Things like that make it easier for content providers to let you download stuff.