Web 1.0 vs Yesterweb
ウェブ1.0 / イエスタウェブ
Both sit in Digital Retro, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. One is style and the other aesthetic. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Web 1.0
Reuses the naivety of the constrained early web as directness and charm.
Yesterweb
The look of a movement that began in February 2021 as a Discord room and grew into a webring and a zine. It calls for leaving what it names the core web, the platforms run for profit, in favor of a peripheral web of hand written personal sites, and it dresses its pages in 88 by 31 buttons and stamps arguing that frames are still a good tool.
| Web 1.0 | Yesterweb | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1990s | 2021–2023 |
| Family | Digital Retro | Digital Retro |
| Kind | Style | Aesthetic |
| Cues | Blue links / Low-res GIFs / System fonts / Plain buttons | Rows of 88 by 31 pixel buttons, put there to be copied by hand onto somebody else's page / A tiled background image that stays fixed while the page scrolls past it / Text heavy GIF stamps carrying the argument itself, such as frames are fine and you should make your own website / Previous, next, and random webring buttons closing out the foot of the page |
| Best used for | Showing affection for internet culture · An unpolished, approachable feel | Linking your own hand written pages directly to other people's pages instead of publishing through a platform · Setting up your own machinery for binding a scene of personal sites together, a ring or a button exchange |
| Type | System sans and monospace | A quirky display face for headings and a plain sans for body text; the manifesto stays as text no matter how long, never as an image. |
| Composition | Left-aligned, borders, table-like division | Stack the content in window like boxes down the page with a vertical band running along one edge, and close the foot with a link list and the ring buttons. |
| Material | White background, blue links, dithered images | Purple and pink laid over black, a tiled image fixed behind everything, and buttons and stamps pasted in as raw GIFs with no compression pass and no shared dimensions. |
| Caution | Don't regress actual accessibility. Separate the look from interaction quality. | Collect the nineties signifiers but drop the argument and the reason for leaving the corporate web goes with it, leaving the nostalgic wallpaper the movement's own summary names as the trap. |