The old gateway had no graphics (animated or not), no tables, no frames, no nothing ...! These pages were guaranteed to work on the first version of Lynx or whatever came before Mosaic (well actually, you need support for forms, but that's pretty standard now ...) so it didn't matter if were sitting at a VT220 in the IITK CC in '96 or at a SGI Indy at MIT -- you got the same quality of service.
To keep up with the changing times, the gateway has been recently jazzed up, the back end has been ported from Perl to Python in the interest of maintainability while the user interface now has the option of preserving the old no-frills look or a new colorful look with frames.