A Handmade Web •

I evoke the term 'handmade web' to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.

Handmade web pages flourished in the mid-to-late-1990s, in the brief period after the academic web and before the corporate web. ‘Handmade’ is by no means the only or best term to define the web of this period.

In her essay, A Vernacular Web (2005), Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-1990s as:

bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.

For more information on Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied's excellent research on the amateur web, see: One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age: Digging through the Geocities Torrent.