Jeffrey Veen talks about how the web world has changed since he wrote his ‘Art and Scient of Web Design’ book 5 years ago.

I wrote The Art and Science of Web Design five years ago. That doesn’t seem like all that long ago, really, but when I recently paged through the book I was pleasantly surprised to find just how much had changed. When I started writing the book in the winter of 1999, there were no large-scale commercial sites built with standards-based markup. Every single design decision we made factored the dial-up experience. Personal home pages were still a handcrafted-html effort; blogs had only barely emerged on the scene.

I was frustrated with the state of things back then. I was building a team at HotWired, which had become a division of the Lycos search portal. That was the height of the boom, and hiring designers meant talking to dozens of people who thought being a good designer meant not collapsing layers before throwing the Photoshop file over to “one of those HTML people.”