1995: From Batman Forever’s cinematic design to HTML tables
1995 begins with web designers creating cinematic experiences using images and browser tricks, and ends with the arrival of table support in Netscape Navigator — giving true control over layout.
If 1994 was when the Web became a publishing medium, then 1995 was when the Web truly marked itself as a unique expressive medium. The Web became a place — a destination — rather than a mere repository for documents.
In previous posts, we've seen how web design elements were limited in the early years of the Web. In 1993, Jennifer Niederst Robbins used iconography to give Global Network Navigator (GNN) a sense of style, and the following year Microsoft used an image map to make its website stand out. But the layout of web pages at that time was fundamentally linear — as a user, you moved from the top of a web page to the bottom, as you scrolled down the page. That's because until Netscape introduced tables to the Web later in 1995, there wasn't a standard way to implement columns or do a grid design.
Despite those layout limitations, in the first half of 1995 we saw a few websites emerge that had a pronounced visual flair — these sites felt like something to be experienced, rather than simply a collection of pages to read.
The Batman Forever site was one of these new experiences. It was designed by three creatives at Grey Entertainment, a New York advertising agency. One of them, Jeffrey Zeldman, went on to become one of the Web's most influential web designers. The other two, Alec Pollak and Steve McCarron, later had successful careers in digital marketing. But in early 1995, when they were tasked with creating a website for an upcoming movie sequel, they were all inexperienced in web design.
As Pollak later told it, he had only just discovered the Web — via Mosaic, of course — and had recently created his first site "with rudimentary HTML." He showed this site to his colleague Zeldman, who was a copywriter at the time. But while they were both curious about the Web, neither of them saw it as a potential creative paradise. As Zeldman later wrote, he initially viewed the Web as kind of a second-class citizen of the internet:
"The first time I looked at the web, I said, “Well, this won’t succeed.” AOL was so much better—they had avatars and everything. The web looked horrible. Think about HTML websites in Netscape 1.0—it was very grim."
Regardless, the trio started working on the Batman Forever site in early 1995 and right from the start, according to Zeldman, it was designed explicitly to be a place on the Web:
"Together, we conceived of Gotham as the site's ruling metaphor, with content linked to appropriate buildings in the cityscape (e.g. text files in the library, bulletin boards and e-mail in the post office), and those buildings themselves as navigational icons."
The homepage was cinematically visual. It had a dark background and centering the page was a stylized image of a gothic-looking cityscape — painted in yellow, red and purple — with the text "Welcome to Gotham" splashed in large computer-green capital letters above it. Below was a menu, styled to look like a row of buildings.
The release of Netscape 1.1 in March 1995 inspired one of the main features of the site: full-screen backgrounds using repeating image tiles. The era of grey backgrounds was now well and truly behind us!
Server-push images were used for animation and an image map linked "different parts of an image to different places," Pollak later explained. The site even made use of video, despite the constraints that Zeldman later described:
"We had videos the size of a postage stamp that were 3MB and back then, you couldn’t stream—you had to download video. There was no Flash or animated GIFs yet, but we hired Doug Rice at Interactive8, a very early digital studio in New York, to write a Perl script that would replace one image with the next to give the effect that a bat was flying toward the viewer. Nobody had ever seen anything like that on the web."
The Batman Forever website was a big part of the marketing campaign for the film, which was released a few weeks after the site, on June 16, 1995. But although the site was unusually visual and impressive for the time, the tie-in between movies and the internet wasn't that unusual. Three big-budget movies were released in 1995 with internet themes: the Keanu Reeves flick Johnny Mnemonic in May, The Net with Sandra Bullock in July, and Hackers in September. (Two other 1995 movies had a virtual reality premise: Virtuosity, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.) So the Web was becoming a part of mainstream culture that year.
The reviews for the Batman Forever site picked up on what made it different from other websites. In a review dated May 8, 1995, Interactive Age noted that it was "a collection of Web pages as experiential as they are informative." There was a hint of choose your own adventure to the site, like a CD-ROM or a HyperCard game. According to Interactive Age:
"Unlike most promotions on the Web, the site features more than advertising copy. "Batman Forever" employs a narrative with unseen twists and hidden pages that users can discover by answering a series of concealed riddles posed by Batman's nemesis, the Riddler."
That web design was beginning to shift from a publishing format to one with a more cinematic scope was made explicit in the review:
"Where other popular sites on the Net - including "Batman's" parent, Pathfinder - employ a magazine metaphor, the "Batman Forever" site relies on a cinematic vision of its environs. Users navigate a virtual skyline of Gotham, visiting such buildings as the post office, radio station, art gallery, library and movie theater."
It's worth pointing out, though, that the technical limitations of the time — slow broadband and relatively primitive personal computers — meant that the Batman Forever site wasn't always a pleasant experience. As Point Communications noted in its review, "All this graphic glory comes at a price: 14.4s [modem speed] and below will find themselves waiting. For the most part, it's worth it."
Table layouts debut
True layout control for web designers finally arrived in September 1995, when Netscape Navigator 2.0 introduced tables layout. Now designers could easily add columns to their pages, which led to navigation sidebars, sectioned off headers, and better positioning of images. Netscape Navigator 2.0 also introduced frames, another method to divide a page into different sections.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer was a little slower to support HTML table rendering, but it arrived in the fall of 1995 with IE 1.5 for Windows NT.
Tables were a new feature in the draft HTML 3.0 specification being worked on at this time, led by the W3C's Dave Raggett. "Borderless tables are useful for layout purposes as well as their traditional role for tabular data," noted the draft spec, in the typical dry style of such documents. By the way, tables are another example of browser vendors being always ahead of the current HTML spec, because HTML 2.0 was only made official in November 1995 — and tables weren't a part of that document.
A good example of a tables layout in late-1995 was HotWired, the website of the popular internet culture magazine, Wired. One of the designers, Jeffrey Veen, later wrote that "there was a strong debate about using tables for layout." Although the HotWired team all understood that HTML was a language that defined structure, they concluded that "the benefits to design outweighed purist argument."
Phil Gyford, who worked at Wired UK at this time, later put up a demo copy of HotWired from November 1995. It shows a 3-column layout.
Arrival of WYSIWYG tools
With new layout capabilities like tables and frames becoming available in late-1995, designers began to have a need for better tools to help them create web pages. In October 1995, a small company called Vermeer released FrontPage, a "visual authoring tool for creating, maintaining, and administering whole web sites". This product caught the attention of Microsoft, then in the midst of its internet transformation — and by January 1996, Vermeer had been acquired.
Also in late 1995, Adobe released its visual authoring tool, PageMill. According to a review in the Society of Cartographers Bulletin, PageMill brought WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) layout editing to the Web. The reviewer called it "an invaluable tool to start exploring the possibilities of layout and design." However, they also noted that PageMill did not yet support visual design of HTML tables.
The first version of FrontPage also had just rudimentary support for tables — you had to edit the HTML code to achieve a table layout. So clearly there was room for these tools to grow before being truly user-friendly to web designers. Nonetheless, it was encouraging that non-coding design tools like FrontPage and PageMill were coming onto the market by the end of 1995.
In the next two articles in Cybercultural's history of web design, we'll look at the influence of two specific web designers in 1995. Do subscribe if you'd like to follow along; and please share this article on social media if you're enjoying the series (I'm @ricmac on Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn).
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