How It All Started

Let's take it way back.
Back into time.

Like certain nerds of a certain age at a certain moment in time, I was fascinated by the words and images our dinky little 28.8 kps modem could produce on the computer screen. Dominated by Times New Roman—or whatever system font your browser used—and laden with randomly-placed gifs and jpgs, we can all admit that most websites in the year 2000 visually wandered between stale and hideous by today's standards. But everything has to start from somewhere, you know?

And that was totally fine, because who really knew any better? Dreamweaver was still owned and developed by Macromedia and limited to professions that I'd never heard of as a 13-year-old; my concerns rightly sat with the burning question of our generation: N'Sync or Backstreet Boys? Were you with Justin and JC or Brian and AJ? (It's Kevin from BB, obviously.) If most young web developers at the time started as I did, we largely began with whatever Microsoft Word had to offer in terms of design, which meant you only had some-16 to 32 color options and pretty much the only way to have images and text together in a readable format was to use tables. Links were almost always blue and purple because CSS styling wasn't very widely used yet (on the sites I went to, at least), and even then there wasn't much you could do with it: everything you wanted to tweak was done by changing properties inline.

Broadly speaking, Word was a very accessible entry point into web development because it was on most PCs and you didn't need to know or understand code at all; much like how modern publishing services such as Wix and Squarespace use optional graphical interfaces to build webpages, you just drag and drop content wherever you please and then the software/engine behind it would generate code that mirrored what you did (for the most part). I'd fallen in with a very fun, interesting, and powerfully creative outlet that didn't require a high degree of technical know-how compared to its boundless potential. Frankly, to my teenaged self it may as well have been magic.

You know what else was magic? The original Japanese anime Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon, which ran from 1992-1997. I'd seen several English-dubbed episodes when I was younger, but it was only until the internet entered our home that I learned there was way, way more to this sparkly cartoon than girl-power teens in sailor costumes fighting monsters. For starters, while Canada-based DIC brought over the first two seasons to North America there were actually five—plus three feature-length movies and a number of live musicals—so whatever story I thought I knew was only half-informed and a quarter true. There weren't five sailor heroes but ten (at least fourteen if you really want to get into it, which I know you don't); characters would confront themes such as unrequited love, sacrifice, death, and resurrection more than once during the course of the show; and the queer content that was worked around in the second season likely became an insurmountable obstacle in the third for North American producers, with or without the low-ratings blame (and if you know what the final season entails you know there was absolutely no way it could ever air here without parents shaking the Earth off its axis in a fit of conniption).¹

This was one spicy meatball(head) of a show, is what I'm saying, and I was flat-out obsessed. It had gotten to the point where my mother (absolute hero and trooper) would take me to LA's Chinatown and Little Tokyo nearly every weekend so I could buy CDs, books, and various other knick-knacks related to Sailor Moon. I'd collected most of the original Kodansha manga volumes and—here are some credentials—got a couple of fansubbed video cassettes from VKLL. It felt kind of useless to bring the weight of this fandom into my real-life friendships, but the inner excitement generated by my feelings toward the show, its characters, and particularly its soundtrack demanded expression that would land me in the same orbit as people just as weird about all this as I was. My people, so to speak.

So like lots and lots of nerds of a certain age, my first real foray into web development started with a website—more precisely, a shrine—dedicated to Sailor Moon (what particular aspect of the show it was about, hey, don't worry about it). It was on Lycos' Angelfire platform as Geocities, Tripod, and Angelfire were the major "free" website platforms available that wasn't Xanga; if you ignored the banner ads above and below the actual website content it wasn't a bad deal at all. Getting familiar with Angelfire's interface and HTML editor was well and good, but I eventually found that copying and pasting Word's HTML output wholesale led to errors.²

Well, shit. How were the people supposed to know about the awesomeness of these interstellar superheroes if I couldn't even get the site off the ground? I've never had a conversation with another developer about how we initially got into actual coding, but I suspect the method of hitting Ctrl+U and lifting someone else's functioning HTML code to use as a starter template wasn't uncommon (most front-end frameworks today initialize as fully functional websites with filler components meant to be edited by the user, so I'm taking it as all above board). Learning about tags and their properties from random tutorials with snippet examples is tremendously difficult for me, personally, because what good is <font color="red" size="2"> if you don't know where the hell it goes within the context of the other tags? Is there a closing tag or is it self-closing like <img>? Things I'd pegged as rules turned out to contain exceptions and vice versa, which is kind of the nature of the everchanging tech behind web development (for example, the <font> element is no longer valid in HTML 5, and let's not get into JavaScript).

So there are rules and there kind of aren't... right? Again, without a live example of a webpage I couldn't make heads or tails of anything. For the sake of imagination just picture a young me, sat at a very 90s particleboard desk in darkness except for the eye-straining light of the CRT monitor, absolutely jamming to the Sailor Moon Sailor Stars Best Song Collection through $10 headphones plugged into a coffee mug-sized Creative desktop speaker. While I don't remember if the image I just described actually happened, what surely did happen was that I spent all night copying someone else's HTML page code into a spiral notebook, retyping it into Notepad, and making incremental changes through trial and error to transform the content into something that was my own.

Eventually I got the hang of coding for what it was at the time—what goes where, what can't go there, <frame> elements are an ass to put together but the end result is very impressive, etc.—to the point of making a second Sailor Moon website (again, don't worry about what it was about). Between the two sites I did pretty much all the stereotypical things associated with web-building and the late 90s/early aughts with the gifs and the hit counters and the guestbooks. I'd joined Sailor Moon webrings (small networks of websites that promoted each other) and proudly displayed how much I thought AOL and Netscape Navigator sucked via gif badges.³ Halcyon days and all that. As mentioned before, CSS wasn't widespread when I built my first website (or second, for that matter), so things were just a mess of harshly clashing colors in boxy layouts from all the tables, like an 80s sedan because border-radius wouldn't come around for another ten years or so.⁴

Everything had to start somewhere, and I suppose my whole deal started here. My clunky websites occupied a very small space on the internet among other clunky websites dedicated to Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, and what-have-you. Over the years I'd sucessfully kept this aspect of my personal history from pretty much any and all conversation, but I can't deny now how key Naoko Takeuchi's blockbuster creation was in setting me on this path to web development. It's the missing panel of a triptych I'd long pretended was a diptych because, well, it's all a little embarassing, isn't it?

Time and experience in the 20-plus years since has shown me that, while a little unorthodox, things unfolding this way is actually something to be a bit proud about—after all, I learned a craft that's ended up greatly shaping the way life's played out since. Web design is still a genuinely enjoyable hobby, as every advancement in tech opens up new ways to explore with the relationship between form and function through visuals, interactivity, and time.

1. Sailor Moon's third and fourth seasons would later be dubbed by another company, Cloverway Inc., its handling of the queer content leading to... interesting results.
2. As I recall, it was due to absolute file paths used within MS Word's output that pointed to the local drive versus relative paths that are, well, directory-relative to the page that's calling them. In short, the images and MIDI files (because of course there were MIDI files) weren't where Word's code said they were, so the online HTML editor rightfully didn't know what the hell was going on.
3. Somewhat ironically, I'm a longtime user of Mozilla's Firefox browser, which was initially created by Netscape Navigator developers.
4. In the meantime, you either had to deal with the edges as-is or create rounded corner/endcap images. As much as I learned in this period, I don't particularly miss that part.