Yet Another Reason I'm Busy Hating CSS!
 

Some years back, when the BFI was still cool, I went there for a lecture on 3D films. The lecturer pointed out that 3D was invented in the 1930s, and had been revived about every twenty years since then (1930s, 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, and now in the 2010s it is back again). He gave the reason for this 20 year cycle as "It takes about 20 years for us to forget how crap 3D is." A slightly less insulting explanation may be "We soon realise it is crap and give up on it, and about 20 years later a new generation who were too young to watch movies, or not even born, discover the technology and think 'That looks cool, we must try it.' And the cycle is repeated."

Stick with me, that will become relevant in a moment.

Way back when I first started creating websites, one piece of HTML I was not taught was "body bgcolor=" so all my websites had a white background. It was not long before someone contacted me to say "that looks rather sucky" (back then it was still safe to put your email address on websites, so most of us did, so it was not unusual for strangers to contact you about your site). Also, back then, frame sets were frowned upon. People who used frame sets were considered "amateurs" and their sites considered "crap".

Now I am trying to use CSS and HTML 5 (yup, last web designer on the planet to accept these concepts). I have been using Google to see what the accepted and popular style is in mainstream sites and I not only find that white backgrounds are back in style, but CSS is used a hell of a lot to mimic frame sets (menu stuck in the "top frame" content scrolls in the "lower frame"). In other words, the sort of shit that was going out of fashion just as I started in this business.

Thinking about it, it is approximately 20 years since I first got into web design. So I guess it is that 20 year rule again. A new generation of programmers is "rediscovering" what us old timers were doing a couple of decades back, and us old timers have forgotten how crap it used to be, so are going back to it.

So maybe if I wait long enough, the cycle will have turned 180 degrees again, and my old templates will be considered "new" and "cool" again.

Or maybe not.......But I'm hanging on to them just in case!

|shhhh|

Technology is changing faster than we can keep up with it... at least that's how I feel...
Maybe I'm getting old :D

And no your templates wont be cool again... because the future is ppl using they mobile devices... and interacting with everything.

See the example of TV... 4k resolution... remember the old days when u one made a 1024W gallery and would get rejected because the majority of ppl had 800px Width monitors? and before that was the Bandwidth ... u had to resize and make every byte count...

the old stuff count has authority I think... old age websites that keep up with the technology....

Agree with what you say, except this:
And the reason for that is:

When I was a kid in the 1960s my dad had an 8mm cine camera. In the late 1970s or very early 1980s (I forget exactly when) I bought my own camera/projector combo. It was expensive and it had taken a lot of saving up. My father's comment was "are you sure you want this because 8mm cine is on the way out, and this new 'video' thing appears to be taking over." My answer was "Naah, video is a flash in the pan, it will die off, but 8mm will survive." With hindsight that was a stupid thing to say except......

A few years back video died. No film company in America or Europe is still making pre-recorded films on video tape. But there are still a few companies (small companies) producing pre-recorded films on 8mm cine film.

Also: movies are all recorded digitally nowadays, not on film. However when at film school I mentioned that I used to use 8mm cine, and the lecturer told me that he had an app on his phone that took downloaded videos, and re-graded them so they looked like old 8mm films. And at the time (about 2 years ago) it was a popular app.

So if 8mm can outlive video, then become "cool" on mobile devices, perhaps there is hope for my old templates in the future!