One of the best The Great Discontent interviews yet:

Then Warner Bros. came to us because they were going to do a Batman movie. At the time, there were 3 million users on the web and we were using Netscape 1.0 or Mosaic. Don Buckley, the marketing director for Warner Bros. in New York, was really smart and asked if we could make a website for the movie. Our agency president lied and said, “Yes, of course.” Then he came to Steve McCarron, Alec Pollak, and me and said, “Boys, can you make a website?” We also lied and said, “Sure.”

I had only experienced AOL and this was before your time, but AOL was pretty dumbed down compared to the Internet; it was a cute, easy to understand interface. The first time I looked at the web, I said, “Well, this won’t succeed.” AOL was so much better—they had avatars and everything. The web looked horrible. Think about HTML websites in Netscape 1.0—it was very grim.

The Life and Times of Jeffrey Zeldman