this entire document is non-normative

The key words MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL
NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, MAY, and
OPTIONAL in this document are to be interpreted as described in
RFC 2119.

bob metcalfe, infoworld 1995-09-21:

in the web's first generation, tim berners-lee launched the url, http, and html standards with prototype unix-based servers and browsers.
a few people noticed that the web might be better than gopher.

in the second generation, marc andreessen and eric bina developed ncsa mosaic at the university of illinois.
several million then suddenly noticed that the web might be better than sex. [sic]

three decades later (as of 2025), and whatever supposedly used to be better than sex hasn't changed. this page consists of nearly backwards-compatible building blocks to those available in the 1993 release of the browser killed by firefox via <iframe>s and a scheme in sheep's clothing. in thirty years the ietf has kicked its rfc number from 1384 to 9720. whatwg and w3c have waged their war over xhtml vs html5. steve jobs published his thoughts on flash, an obituary to futurewave's overzealous dreams of an interactive world wide web after their last hopes were snuffed out and snorted by adobe's executives.

on "javascript is not scheme":

other art:

for-profit (creative) software #flash

marc, rapgenius 2013:

i often wonder how the internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum.

so now—since xanadu didn't ship—we sit in the tar pit of dreams of post-war narcisstic mania, waiting for hypertext to emerge from his well, for comments, annotations, ratings, and likes to coalesce into fucking geniusrap, and to desperately reign in more webshit before nvidia-powered crawlers smolder our electrical grids and ability for art.

roko's basilisk is no thought "experiment", for that it would have its audience take an alternative perspective and ponder the "possibility". the basilisk though, is an infohazard. and the bad news [about hell] is, whatever humans can imagine, they can usually create.

i hope that if i ever change the design of the site, vector still sits there bleeding out in the corner, even if that's just her clone.

long live mosaic, watch as we shatter what's left of it.
death to the web.