I do think that mid-2000s "web 2.0" era that came after the era of shiny pipes and stuff. The "web 2.0 era" was pretty good. There was a doubling down on seman

I do think that mid-2000s "web 2.0" era that came after the era of shiny pipes and stuff. The "web 2.0 era" was pretty good. There was a doubling down on semantic HTML, sharing data via RSS, etc. The first cross browser JS frameworks began to pop up which allowed everybody write JS once that would work mostly everywhere. During that era there was definitely a lot of derision of that late "web 1.0" era with the superduper photoshop-image-slice-heavy rendered pipes and stuff UIs. At its worst a lot of it fundamentally broke basic web functionality like bookmarking and such. The derision was probably justified, since it actually sort of sucked when the whole web looked and worked like that. HOWEVER, like you I am nostalgic for some of that excess! I like it better than a lot of today's web!