Sure a website from 1996 will look the same. It will also have no accessibility, work terribly on mobile, be largely like reading a Word document and have none of the interesting features of modern web sites. Your world is not the world most people want.
I can think of some sites on the order of 15 - 20 years old that work better on mobile than sites made in the last 5.
And while the various accommodations for accessibility that have come up over the last two decades are nice, the fact is that most of the web was fairly accessibly using specialized user agents (or even just Lynx) by the very late 90s.
Hacker News is one such site that is very basic and has none of the stuff you outline as modern features. You know what? It is by far one of the most performant and enjoyable websites I use daily.
Now let's talk about taking the entire web back to 1996. No Javascript, Websockets/SSE, AJAX, CSS etc. You really think all of the innovations made in the last two decades is just throw-away ?
> let's talk about taking the entire web back to 1996.
Let's not, that's a tangent. The original statement to which you replied was this:
> A website from 1996 will look much the same in a modern version of Chrome. Good luck with your SDKs.
That remains true, despite the advances you listed. http://www.thekrib.com/ is an example from 1994 which still looks like it renders about the same. It doesn't have the bells and whistles, but the point is, _what was written remains available._ Interactive applications tracking a moving SDK cannot be left for future generations, they have to be maintained. Putting non-interactive content into those types of applications is forcing a maintenance burden forevermore.
The modern browser is quite good at rendering text, just as it was in 1996. The web is largely still about words. What improvement is so important as to strike the words of those from 1996 off the record?
Nobody here has argued to start striking outdated websites off the record. However the advent of reader mode has certainly helped things in that neighborhood come through a bit cleaner.
But as yet websites don’t control rapidly evolving and privacy sensitive hardware on mobile devices. Also, user time spent in apps versus web browsers is hovering around ~90% versus 10. Might it be possible that having an up-to-date experience as it’s enforced by mobile platform owners could contribute somewhat to this abundant user preference for apps?
There is a lot to be said about adaptive web fails, text or graphics overflowing outside of the screen while locking the zoom level, botched overrides of browser behaviors. A simple old html page is often more readable on a smartphone than a page where the developper tried hard to fuck with the way it is rendered on a small screen. If the text is too small you can easily zoom in. And most smartphones these days have large, high dpi screens.
Sure a website from 1996 will look the same. It will also have no accessibility, work terribly on mobile, be largely like reading a Word document and have none of the interesting features of modern web sites. Your world is not the world most people want.