Agreed. Without standards, we wouldn’t have the rich web-based ecosystem we have now.

As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.

Just like websites dying out, I think people back then made them as passion projects they hoped would turn into something more (or not). I remember one I used in the early 2000s called Selida. It had this bug where it would crash randomly on save and I’d lose all of my work. I didn’t know any better and just kept using it. The end result is I had to retype my HTML so many times that it hammered it into my head until I was proficient :) This was a WYSIWYG with a code editor view (like Dreamweaver).

They will definitely keep the endpoint aliases around for years. No real cost in doing so.

This is why UX teams should be data-driven. Do user research and A/B testing to hone your UI.

They’re describing material design, which Google popularized. Skeuomorphism with things that could exist in the real world, avoid breaking the laws of physics, etc. Which then morphed into flat design as things like drop shadows were seen as dated. You are here.