How this museum was made

Each of the 17 rooms is a real page built with the techniques of its era, not a screenshot. Where a technique still works in today's browsers, the room uses it as-is: <font> tags, nested tables, floats, <frameset>. Where it is gone for good (Flash, <blink>, MIDI background music), the effect is recreated with modern CSS and JavaScript, and the curator panel says so.

House rules

Every brand, person and product in the demos is invented. No real logos, screenshots or trademarks.
All imagery is drawn with CSS or SVG in the repository. No hotlinked or scraped assets.
The code you see in the curator panel is the code that runs, pulled from the source files at build time.
Nothing autoplays sound. Blinking never exceeds three flashes per second.
No analytics, no cookies, no third-party requests.
Readable mode (the Aa button) raises contrast and turns off motion in every era.

Dates are approximate

Styles never start or stop on a date. The year ranges mark when a look was most common, and they overlap on purpose: plenty of table layouts outlived the web standards movement, and Flash intros lingered well into the responsive era.

The eras

BBS, terminals & pre-web systems 1978–1995
Early hypertext 1991–1995
Personal homepages 1995–2000
Table layouts & portals 1996–2003
Flash & splash intros 1997–2009
Y2K chrome & futurism 1998–2003
Web standards & CSS layouts 2001–2007
Blogs & MySpace 2003–2008
Web 2.0 gloss 2005–2009
Skeuomorphism & texture 2007–2013
Responsive & grid frameworks 2010–2015
Flat & Metro 2012–2016
Parallax & one-page storytelling 2012–2017
Material Design 2014–2019
Brutalism & neubrutalism 2016–2024
Gradients, glass & soft UI 2018–2023
Bento & scroll-driven (now) 2023–2026

Sources

Licence

Code is released under the MIT licence. Written content is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Built with Nuxt in static mode and hosted on Cloudflare Pages at webdesign.atlesque.dev.