This look with animations and bright text on dark repeated backgrounds was definitely popular for a while in the late 90s. You wouldn’t see it on larger sites like Yahoo or CNN, but it was definitely not unheard of for personal sites.
Gray backgrounds where also popular, with bright blue for unvisited links and purple for visited links. IIRC this was inspired by the default colors of Netscape Navigator 2.
> IIRC this was inspired by the default colors of Netscape Navigator 2.
"Inspired" is an interesting word for "didn't set custom values." And I believe Mosaic used the same colors before. I'm not even sure when HTML introduced the corresponding attributes (this was all before CSS ...)
Gray backgrounds where also popular, with bright blue for unvisited links and purple for visited links. IIRC this was inspired by the default colors of Netscape Navigator 2.