The Kids Are Hand-Coding HTML Again, and Honestly? The Internet Needed This

There's a specific feeling I get scrolling through a modern personal website built in 2024: the creator picked a template, wrote three SEO-optimized paragraphs about their "content journey," and called it a homepage. Then there's the other feeling — the one I get when a 22-year-old's site loads with a tiled starfield background, a JavaScript snowfall effect, and a guestbook that actually works.

The second feeling is better. And increasingly, I'm not alone in thinking so.

The Anti-Feed Movement Is Real

Something shifted over the past few years. A generation raised on TikTok and Instagram — platforms where the algorithm decides what you see and a design committee in Menlo Park decides what everything looks like — started asking a reasonable question: what if my corner of the internet was actually mine?

The result is a quiet renaissance. Neocities, the spiritual successor to GeoCities, hosts over a million sites. Webring directories have popped up linking personal blogs, digital gardens, and shrines to niche interests. There's a whole scene of people trading 88x31 buttons like they're Pokemon cards. These aren't ironic art projects, mostly. They're sincere.

The irony is thick, though: the generation most fluent in algorithms is the one rejecting them hardest. When your entire online life has been mediated by engagement metrics, a hand-coded page with a visitor counter feels almost transgressive. Nobody's A/B testing your favorite color.

Why the Old Web Hits Different

Here's my theory about why this resonates: the early web was legibly human. You could see the person in the page — the broken links, the MIDI autoplay, the animated GIF of a construction worker announcing "under construction" for five straight years. It was messy because a person made it, alone, for no commercial reason whatsoever.

Compare that to today's homogenized web, where every restaurant site, every portfolio, every landing page uses the same three fonts and the same stock photos. SEO optimization has flattened the internet into a mall food court. The retro-web revival is, at its core, a demand for texture.

There's also a craft angle. Writing HTML and CSS by hand — no framework, no build step, no npm install of 400 dependencies — is a skill, and young developers are treating it like one. The 32-bit.cafe and similar communities run challenges, share snippets, and treat a well-crafted table layout the way previous generations treated a clean git history.

Building Your Own Corner of the Web

Convinced? Good. Here's the starter pack, no framework required.

Start with one page. Seriously. An index.html with your name, a few links, and something you like. Upload it to Neocities (free) or any static host. Done — you have a homepage. It doesn't need to be good. It needs to be yours.

Learn just enough HTML. You need maybe a dozen tags to make something real: headings, paragraphs, links, images, lists. MDN's tutorials cover it in an afternoon. Every retro site you admire is just these tags, arranged with more confidence than skill. That's the secret.

Steal like it's 1999. Right-click, View Source. This is not just legal on the old web — it's the tradition. People learned HTML by reading each other's code, and that culture is alive again. Grab a free background tile, a cursor from a cursor archive, an 88x31 button. Attribution is polite; hoarding is for platforms.

Join a webring. This is the social layer of the non-social web. You add your site to a ring, and visitors can surf to the next person's page. It's discovery without an algorithm — just trust and hyperlinks, the way it was supposed to work.

Put something weird on it. A page about your favorite fonts. A shrine to a discontinued soda. A blog you update twice a year. The old web's magic was that it was unmonetized personal expression, and that magic is available to you at zero cost.

The Point Isn't Nostalgia

Here's the thing most think pieces miss: this isn't actually about the past. Most people building these sites never saw GeoCities in its prime. They're not recreating 1998 — they're using its aesthetics to build something 2024 desperately lacks: web pages that belong to people instead of platforms.

The under construction GIF was always a promise. It meant: someone's working on this, someone cares, come back later and it'll be different. That's a better promise than anything an infinite scroll has ever made.

So go build the thing. The web has room for your starfield background. It always did.