Designing for AI means designing like it’s 1999

The useful part

That means looking back at the unfinished, handmade web to reinvent how we design for AI вЂ" and who we become вЂ" now. If you designed for the web in 1999, you remember the feeling while the Hamster Dance video was playing in the background. The browser wars were still on, so a layout that worked in Netscape often broke in Internet Explorer вЂ" and you couldn’t always trust two versions of the same browser to render a page the same way.

How it works

• You were improvising the medium and inventing its toolkit at the same time, which is a strange way to work and, in hindsight, the whole opportunity.
• You shipped something, watched people get confused, and changedВ it.
• CSS technically existed, but browser support was so patchy you couldn’t really lay out a page with it вЂ" serious layouts meant nesting tables inside tables and propping them open with invisible...

Details worth keeping

You can’t talk about 1999 without HamsterВ Dance. Pages were handmade вЂ" for a lot of us, the WYSIWYG editor was Notepad вЂ" the conventions were improvised, the JavaScript was rough, and some of the most popular things online were gloriously, defiantly pointless, like the HamsterВ Dance. We had all the tags вЂ"  FRAME, MARQUEE andВ BLINK.