>It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then, It couldn't because the first wave of HTML pages were hand-written by programmers instead of design

>It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then, It couldn't because the first wave of HTML pages were hand-written by programmers instead of designers. It was several years later that slick HTML editors "democratized" webpage creation by empowering designers-who-weren't-programmers to author webpages with better aesthetics.