Oooo well said. One of the first programs I ever wrote was a scraper for such an ASPX site. Parsing state ids and reposting them over and over again... what a joy it was.
The early web were the era of dozens, perhaps hundreds of competing web browsers which were made possible by simple, well-engineered web standards. Pages were served statically, or with CGI scripts. You had a whole swarm of generic spiders, crawlers, and bots which automated things on the web for you. Anyone could write a web browser, so many people did.
The dot-com boom/bust had companies doubling in size every few months, people who could barely code HTML making 6-figure salaries, Netscape imploding, early JavaScript (which, at the time, looked like a high schooler's attempt at a programming language), and web standards with every conceivable ill-thought-out idea grafted in.
If one of the first programs you ever wrote was a scraper for an ASPX site, you never saw the elegance of the early days. ASPX came out not just after HTML3, but after HTML4.
Most definitions of the early web include the PHP Cambrian explosion because essentially all websites today got their start then and only a few horseshoe crabs sites (mostly the homepages for CS profs!) predating it survive. Gopher sites were also probably really easy to scrape too. ;-)
But my original comment was 100% unambiguous: "I liked HTML2. I hated basically everything which went into HTML3 and HTML4."
Y'all responded by citing bad examples from the HTML3 / HTML4 era as examples of things going wrong...
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Note: Before I get jumped on for "kid," it's the username.