Web 1.0 Components

About

About W1C

W1C is a web component library for people who want the old web’s texture without bringing back its broken markup.

The early personal web was full of static pages, visible links, tiled backgrounds, guestbooks, badges, hand-made navigation, and sites that looked like one person had been there.

GeoCities made that kind of web easy to publish at large scale. It organized personal pages into neighborhoods, gave ordinary people free space, and left behind a record of fan pages, memorials, school projects, clubs, experiments, jokes, and unfinished rooms. I want to help make the web feel authored again by using that history as design material.

Why this exists

Most component libraries assume a contemporary product interface that has smooth cards, neutral dashboards, flat forms, and a thin layer of brand color. W1C is for a different job. No shade to shadcn, but every app doesn’t have to be “vercel-core.”

It should help you build:

  • Static docs and personal pages that look hand-built.
  • Small retro UI surfaces with slots, attributes, CSS custom properties & parts.
  • Windows 95, GNOME 2, classic Mac, Web 1.0, and GeoCities-inspired interfaces. For me that means capturing that feeling of booting up a computer for the first time and going to yahooligans or something.
  • Server-rendered pages that can import custom elements and CSS without a framework wrapper.

Footprint

W1C keeps the parts of the early web that still work:

  • Obvious navigation
  • Small reusable graphics
  • Bold typography
  • Good old hypermedia

It leaves the harmful parts behind:

  • Layout tables for non-tabular content
  • Inaccessible content

References

The library draws from the wider web component ecosystem, and writing on Web 1.0.

Made with ☕ by Owais