It is fashion-driven, but that's not to say that it ignores what users want. Nobody was asking for bell bottoms or leisure suits either, but people bought milli

It is fashion-driven, but that's not to say that it ignores what users want. Nobody was asking for bell bottoms or leisure suits either, but people bought millions of them. Customers will say "our site needs a refresh" or "our site looks dated", when what they mean is that, regardless of whether or not its functional, they seem old and stodgy compared to their competitors. This happens in brick-and-mortar too: restaurant or shop owners will remodel even if there's nothing really wrong with their existing shop functionally. The real problem is that fashions are even possible on the web. This is what Ted Nelson calls the "triumph of typesetters over authors," and it's one of the great tragedies of the computer age. We could have had a real, global, hypertext system with working two way links and micropayments, but instead we got HTTP and HTML.