You never know what you’ll find clicking through Craigslist — free-range rideshares, assorted rants & raves (mostly rants), homeless chickens — but one thing you can count on is a glimpse into the distant past of web design.

Apart from a huge increase in available categories, not a whole lot has changed about Craigslist since it first set up shop on the “Web’’ in 1996 as a simple community classifieds service for San Franciscans (Boston became its second launch city in 2000). Look at any early iteration of the site and you’ll find the same white screen, busy with blue Times New Roman hyperlinks, clunky buttons, dropdown menus, and other table-based tropes of early HTML.

By today’s design standards, the site retains the aesthetic value of a parking lot, a place of abiding austerity, where function totally eclipses fashion. It’s utilitarian to the point of near invisibility — and what you can see is ugly.

So, of course, it’s all the rage.

Look around today’s Internet, especially its more design-conscious quarters, and you’ll find more than a few winking callbacks to this bygone era of blaringly basic Web 1.0 hypertext, complete with cheesy Shockwave effects, lame animated GIFs, quirky Javascripts, static layouts, and intentionally nightmarish navigation.

It’s a design phenomenon that’s lately received a fair share of attention through the curation of Pascal Deville, whose site Brutalist Websites archives some of the more adventurous recent realizations of the trend, but has also lent the wave a name that seems to be sticking.

Deville borrows both the term “Brutalism’’ — assigned to the style of mid-century urban architecture familiar to any Bostonian who has walked past the massive pulled molar that is Boston City Hall — but also its terms, which he lifts directly and tweaks slightly from the Wikipedia entry for architectural Brutalism:

“In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today’s web design,’’ he supplies at the top of the page.

As was the case when the term was first applied to architecture (in Reyner Banham’s 1955 essay “The New Brutalism’’) “Brutalist’’ is necessarily a retrospective term, and potentially a misleading one. As Diana Budds described it, Brutalism has become a “perceived personification of a building rather than a specific architectural expression.’’ As such, Brutalist structures tend to adopt the tones of the term: They seem cold, institutional, forbidding, brutal.

But Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles did not set out to design a “brutalist’’ Boston City Hall any more than Paul Rudolph was shooting for “brutal’’ with his sculptural (and ultimately unfinished) Government Service Center. The commission for Le Corbusier’s now-emblematically “Brutalist’’ Carpenter Center called for an “inspirational building,’’ not a brutal one — and the Crimson deemed the finished product “singularly inviting.’’

“If the aesthetic complaints are signs of poor taste,’’ wrote Michael S. Gruen in a May 1963 supplement tied to the opening of the Center, “perhaps the activities of the Center will educate their adherents out of their current views.’’

(Fat chance. Bostonians’ enduring animus toward Brutalism runs second only to its hatred for a certain sucky baseball team that sucks.)

Deville’s invocation of “Brutalism’’ to describe this anachronistic streak in web design takes the negative connotations of the term into account. Yes, the sites may be objectively ugly, but there’s also beauty to be found in their emulation of the young, hand-made Web.

And yes, there’s an inherently arch ironic attitude that goes into building a new site from dated parts (a re-appropriation of the old that isn’t so different from lo-fi aesthetics in music, or #normcore trends in fashion), but it also requires a true reverence for the materials. You could even connect many of these “Brutalist’’ sites to a long tradition of “net art’’ that reaches back two decades to experiments like (the defunct) Redsmoke and the endless e-galleries of Superbad.

“I wouldn’t call it a protest but a shout-out for more humanity in today’s web design,’’ Deville told Fast Company about the project.

It’s for this reason that I humbly submit that “Brutalism’’ misses the mark. If anything, we should follow the lead of local architects Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, and Chris Grimley — who, in their recent book, call for not just a reconsideration of the thinking behind Brutalist architecture, but a full-scale rebranding: Goodbye “Brutalist,’’ hello “Heroic.’’

Sure, in its early days, the Web was crude and simple, function-forward and frustratingly plain. But just as the original plans of those architects we label “Brutalists’’ was to construct massive monuments to human ambition, futuristic “forms expressive of their functions’’ (as the Boston Society of Architects described City Hall in 1976), the original architects of the Web were building structures meant to embrace and showcase the freedoms granted by a powerful medium. In its early pages, the Web was experimental, unbound by guidelines or conventions, and marked by millions of hands making it into something – anything. It was certainly ugly, but it was never “brutal.’’ It was bold and brave (and sometimes blinking). It was heroic!

The history of web design shows us a fluid form slowly taking shape (like poured concrete). And now “Brutalism,’’ or whatever we decide to call it, suggests we may be ready to bring out the jackhammer. (I think I saw one on Craigslist.)

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur