[xxr]

> For example, TFA looks like a page I'd have browsed in IE5 as a kid, but if you look at the markup, it's using HTML5 tags and Flexbox (which became a W3C WR in 2017), while a period site would have used an HTML table to get the same effect.

Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?

[pteraspidomorph]

I'm happy they didn't choose to go full authentic with quirks mode and table-based layouts, because Firefox has some truly ancient bugs in nested table rendering... that'll never get fixed, because... no one uses them anymore!

[jdpage]

I think the layout as such (the grid of categories) isn't particularly dated, though a modern site would style them as tiles. The centered text can feel a little dated, but the biggest thing making it feel old is that it uses the default browser styles for a lot of page elements, particularly the font.

[nkrisc]

I think it’s the former. Many of these retro layouts are pretty terrible. They existed because they were the best at the time, but using modern HTML features to recreate bad layouts from the last is just missing the point completely.

[freeone3000]

They’re making their own point. This is a document as a piece of expression and communication, not pure utility.