They're earlier. There's basically 3 design eras. The first used 1 bit transparent gifs (i used those on my bootstra386.com site)
The second had 40x40 buttons, then the third had 88x31...
Ironically the best place to find this evidence is in books. Head on over to archive.org, find some mass market "how to use the web" books and they're full of screenshots.
You could also do wayback machine but during the "folk art" era of the web, there was long forgotten web properties run by "just some person" with names like "web fairy's daily roundup" with these long links like homesite.unc.edu/~rhonda/links.htm or whatever.
The fetishism for dot coms is probably post-1997
When you go through these old texts it's a sea of sites you have never heard of. Some of those are in the wayback, a lot of them aren't.
You can clearly see the eras. There's also some promotional videos such as
https://youtu.be/-1l6aBgX5UY?si=UioQTDenqHelQc07
88x31 is where most of the effort has been placed on the archives and so I kind of just pass over that one
The last thing is the hypercard cross-over ... there were many users and creators that went from that platform to the web and they took their hypercard design language with them.
The 88x31 might be called the first post-hypercard era.
The second had 40x40 buttons, then the third had 88x31...
Ironically the best place to find this evidence is in books. Head on over to archive.org, find some mass market "how to use the web" books and they're full of screenshots.
You could also do wayback machine but during the "folk art" era of the web, there was long forgotten web properties run by "just some person" with names like "web fairy's daily roundup" with these long links like homesite.unc.edu/~rhonda/links.htm or whatever.
The fetishism for dot coms is probably post-1997
When you go through these old texts it's a sea of sites you have never heard of. Some of those are in the wayback, a lot of them aren't.
You can clearly see the eras. There's also some promotional videos such as
https://youtu.be/-1l6aBgX5UY?si=UioQTDenqHelQc07
88x31 is where most of the effort has been placed on the archives and so I kind of just pass over that one
The last thing is the hypercard cross-over ... there were many users and creators that went from that platform to the web and they took their hypercard design language with them.
The 88x31 might be called the first post-hypercard era.