Neal Agarwal has been coding since he was ten years old and graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in computer science. He’s interested in combining creativity and technology, as you can see in all of his projects. Here, Neal lays down his argument for web creators like himself to return to a time when digital tools were utilised to create a wonderfully weird online world.

When I was growing up, Flash was all the rage and the web felt like a digital Burning Man. This was during the 2000s when the web was a landscape where people cultivated their own unique creations. I like to call this the “Weird Web”, a place where internet creators expressed themselves through interactive content, games and experiments. It was a place that brought delight and joy. There were creative tools like Line Rider, interactive visualisations like The Scale of the Universe, and who could forget bizarre games like This is The Only Level?

But, when Flash slowly died a decade later, the weird web went with it. Social media became the 800-pound gorilla that slowly swallowed up independent creators. That said, there are a few trends today that give me hope that the weird web will make a comeback. Not only that, but I think it’ll be even better this time around.

Yet to understand the future and what may be possible in 2020, I think it’s important to first understand the past. Weird Web 1.0 was almost entirely made with Flash, a programme with capabilities ahead of its time. It provided amazing cross-browser functionality, animation, graphics and sound. In fact, when Steve Jobs wrote the death letter for Flash in 2010, HTML5 was still lacking in many of these areas. It took a long time for it to catch up, but once it did, it quickly surpassed Flash in performance and cross-browser capability. The days of opening Internet Explorer 6 and sighing at your massacred web page are (mostly) over.