I lived through the rise of Web 1.0. Most of the people I knew who were actively engaged in the web were developing interactive sites. In fact, I would say that there was a higher percentage of the internet population actively programming in Web 1.0 than there are today.

Web 2.0 saw the rise of huge corporations which created brain dead sites like Twitter and Facebook. These massive sites leveraged their user base to gain market dominance. Apparently both the public and the technorati preferred the brain dead sites to dynamic sites.

Small sites faced other big challenges. The standards community kept changing the standards and popular programming languages like PHP, Flash and Applets had some extremely serious security holes.

There were some really absurd things that happened. 

For example, it was common for web programmers to use the HTML table tag to display data from database tables. Almost all data driven web sites made heavy use of the TABLE.

The TABLE tag is a dynamic design element optimized for displaying tabular data. 

The technorati declared that the TABLE tag was bad form. Google gave demerits for using the table tag and suddenly data driven web sites were shadowed banned.

The table tag is still the ideal mechanism for displaying dynamic data from database tables.

The most absurd move came with the "padding" attribute. A confusing sentence in the original documentation for HTML implied that all size related attributes should be additive. Netscape decided to implemented an intuitive understanding of padding. In Netscape, adding padding to a box reduced the display space inside the box. Microsoft followed Netscape in their implementation of padding.

The enemies of Microsoft realized that they could gain the upper hand by adopting the counter-intuitive idea that padding increases the size of the box.

Please understand how stupid this idea is.. Take a box and put padding inside the box.

Does the padding increase the size of the box? 

Adding padding inside a box decreases the space in the box.

The decision to change the implementation of padding from the intuitive definition to the counter-intuitive definition created a situation where it was impossible to create dynamic web sites that would fit properly on the small screens of the day. 

This one change wiped out hundreds of thousands of small web sites because small sites had to either design for Explorer or for Mozilla.

The solution was to look at the HTTP header. Determine the browser and to display sites based on the browser.

Only big companies could afford the testing departments needed to assure that web sites displayed properly on all computers. 

Personally, I would love to return to the day where independent people could make some money with independent web development. 

This transition would involve to returning to something that existed and not creating something new.

!WINE

Public access to the web came through dial up services like CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy.  There were numerous dial up BBS services.

The very first public sites on the Internet were dynamic forums. 

People of the Web 1.0 ridiculed static web sites as online brochures.

The dynamic forums were quickly followed by online shops like eBay and Amazon. eBay is an auction house. People buy and sell through dynamic auctions on eBay. There were numerous classified ad sites.

Unfortunately, people were reluctant to give their credit card numbers to small web sites. Local states had to charge local sales tax. So people wanted to shop out of state to avoid the tax. The sad result is that Amazon came to dominate ecommerce.

I worked for a telephone company. Our site let people pay their bills, review their voice mail, send text messages, etc.

Most of the early sites were dynamic.

Google came along. The PR algorithm of Google favored static pages which were keyword rich. The Web Archive archived static pages. This might give the illusion that the web was flat, but it was dynamic.

Google favored blogs to online forums. I guess you could call blogs read only. Most blogs allowed user comments and included guestbooks and featured things like Webrings.

Spammers attacked routinely attacked any open feature on a blog and blogs reduced their use of community features.

The term Web 2.0 was used to describe web sites designed for smart phones. Twitter was initially built on the concept of text messaging which is why they had the 144 character limit for tweets.

The claim that Web 1.0 was nothing but static pages is an outright lie.