But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking? Form over function

But for the love of god: a textured red background that made the already shittily rendered text even harder to read?! What were we thinking? Form over function. Fun, original formatting was more important than coveying information well. Keep in mind that displays sucked. Unless you had a Trinitron or similar quality display, you probably had a crappy 14" 4:3 screen with awful dot pitch, wildly inconsistent colors, part of the screen noticably fuzzier than the rest, and you likely could only have 256 colors (and your browser might not even select them optimally). You'd select a different window and the VGA palette would reset, making the now-background window look like a Pollock painting. There was too much awful going on for people to care. Besides, the vast majority of pages were simple black text and blue links on a white background. As long as you didn't use the blink tag, nobody got upset.