I recommend The Geocities Gallery [1] to go back in time and experience the 90s web yourself, there is something beautiful about all these personal web pages. Each one has a distinct look that alone can tell a lot about the author's personality, usually contains some bio info together with several random personal pictures, lists of recommended links with short descriptions, loose talk about their hobbies and so on - it's just so personal and calming, a striking contrast to today's social media where each profile page looks the same (bland and boring), with overwhelming, ever growing amount of content and a pressure to maintain a certain image of one's life.
Man, thanks for the rabbit hole. I spent a while there, both trying to find my old site (I don't recall which directory under Area51 it was in, and it may never have been archived) and just reliving it.
Memory is weird. Somehow viewing Geocities made me recall the smell of the old internet. Probably just the smell of the family room where the computer was.
I remember using the brick background from windows, combined with transparent GIF graffiti in the mid 90s to create a pretty cool effect.
Early efforts from the BBS art groups like ACID, ICE, FIRE etc was also very cool at the time.
Anything more advanced prior to IE5/6s dominance was relegated Flash though. I built a framework similar to React around E4X in the early 00s. ActionScript/Flash/Flex, Mozilla/Netscape supported it and VB.Net's XML literal notation was similar.
MS and Google wouldn't adopt it and then JSON became king.
[1] https://geocities.restorativland.org/