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Back in the early part of this decade, you could buy a magazine called create-online, which was aimed at the pro/amateur-designer market. Filled with hip and trendy content, it made for some good reading, although it did have a feature each month where various designer bods gave a list of the favourite sites of the moment and invarably they'd all say K10k.net or CoolHomePages. Apart from this, it proved to be an inspiration, and introduced me to the delights of sites such as 2advanced, Praystation and Pixelsurgeon.

The magazine tended to have a particular theme per issues, such as 'broadband', 'advertising', 'the Future' etc. Looking at these, its interesting to see that
in some respects, they were quite close to the money on how the web would develop, and in other respects, how wrong they were. The biggest flaw in their predictions was that they belived the proloferation and speed of Broadband would happen alot quicker and be more wide spread than it currently is.

If I go back to the backissues in another ten years time, predictions about watching television over the web, and rich multimedia experiences may be close to the truth than they are today. At the time, the magazine was catering for the flash style of sites, that had intricate front ends but little or no real content, aimed at pleasing designers rather than pleasing the more general viewing public.

If the magaizne existed today (I wish it did) it would no doubt be talking about the importance of web standards, using CSS to separate style form content, using php/perl/mysql/asp etc to develop the backend of sites, and how flash should be used sparingly, to add to the content, not to dictate it.

I'm hoping to expand on this topic over the next few weeks, when I get chance to sit down and digest whats in the magazines in more detail.