"The early history of mankind is marked by people doing clever things with crude tools. The modern history of mankind is marked by people doing crude things with clever tools."
Before Web 2.0 and endless recursive markup [abstraction layers], some very clever people created a hybrid between normal text and computer-readable instructions for links between pages, images, and other information types. They called this Hyper-Text Markup Language. It was intended to be simple and expressive enough for anyone who wanted to post things about themselves to be able to easily do so.
This was really cool except that it was all open and non-proprietary which means people didn't have vested interests in hooking college kids with promotions and free stuff with marketing logos during the distant-future dot-com volcano, and therefore this standard is buried deep within the crust of the internet like Pompei. Meanwhile, a few decades later, our human goals remain unchanged, we just accomplish them with about 100 times the code.
The style of this site is a visual reminder of what was and how well it worked before we replaced learning with very large hammers.
