The Dream Weaver

[2000] A fake internet led me to web design.

On the eve of the new millennium, I was still wondering when I would finally get internet access at home. Not long after, my family announced that we were getting connected. I was thrilled.

But when the technician came to install it, something felt off.

He plugged the modem into the TV jack instead of the phone line I expected, and only after everything was set up did I realize what kind of network this really was.

It wasn’t the internet at all. It wasn’t even a LAN. The service provider periodically bundled files from popular websites and pushed them through the cable TV network, and users downloaded them through a receiver attached to the computer. In practice, it felt less like a network than a kind of broadcast radio.

Even so, I was delighted. For the first time, I could browse websites at home. I could read the news, look at pictures, and watch simple animations. Every page opened instantly. On the real internet, loading a single page could take several seconds — sometimes even minutes.

Of course, these offline websites were far from perfect. Broken paths were common, and pages often failed to display correctly. Whenever I came across a broken page, I would open it in Notepad and try to fix it myself.

That was how I began to learn HTML.

Little by little, I started to understand what each tag meant, along with the CSS that often appeared beside it. What excited me even more was that Internet Explorer supported VBScript, and since I already knew a little Visual Basic, I could quickly start making simple effects of my own — stars following the cursor, shaking windows, and other little tricks that felt magical at the time.

What made web design especially appealing was how little it required. Every computer already had a browser and Notepad. That meant I could work almost anywhere — in a computer lab, at a relative’s house, or anywhere else I happened to have a few spare minutes with a computer. Even in a short session, I could build a page, test an idea, or try out a new effect. Other programming languages didn’t offer that kind of freedom.

That year, on my birthday, my uncle heard that I had become interested in web design and gave me a CD containing three famous programs: Fireworks, Flash, and Dreamweaver.

I never really used Fireworks. Flash was more powerful, but it felt too heavy and too closed compared with HTML. HTML was simple. It was open. All it required was a text editor, and I could write it on almost any computer. In the end, I chose Dreamweaver as my main tool for building the pure HTML pages.

That choice stayed with me for the next decade. And in some ways, I have stayed with HTML ever since.