The CSS on the page is only to make modern browsers behave like old ones in order to match the rendering.

The guestbook has some javascript if you notice to defeat spam: https://bootstra386.com/guestbook.html but it's the kind of javascript that netscape 2.0 can run without issue.

Are they going out of their way to recreate an aesthetic that was originally the easiest thing to create given the language specs of the past, or is there something about this look and feel that is so fundamental to the idea of making websites that basically anything that looks like any era or variety of HTML will converge on it?

I like your thinking. Beautiful website, by the way!

https://portal.mozz.us/gopher/gopher.somnolescent.net/9/w2kr...

with these NEW values in about:config set to true:

    security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256
    security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_aes_128_gcm_sha256

    security.ssl3.ecdh_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
    security.ssl3.ecdh_rsa_rc4_128_sha
    security.ssl3.ecdhe_ecdsa_rc4_128_sha
    security.ssl3.ecdhe_rsa_rc4_128_sha
    security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_md5
    security.ssl3.rsa_rc4_128_sha

What is (was) it? I can't find anything with a search (too many unrelated results).

X is just one cappuccino, Y is just 3.5 bagels, Z costs not more than a pint, A costs almost as much as a nice meal … and so on. God's sake! :)

(As a bit of meta, one would notice how in making this argument it itself has to use the classifying approach, but that does not defeat the point and is rather more of a pre-requisite for communicating it.)

Notably, the classifying mode was shown in other animals (as this is common to probably every creature with two eyes and a brain) to engage when seeking food or interacting with friendly creatures. This highlights its ultimate purposes—consumption and communication, not truth.

In a healthy human both parts act in tandem by selectively inhibiting each other; I believe in later sections he goes a bit into the dangers of over-prioritizing exclusively the classifying part all the time.

Due to the unattainability of comprehensive and lossless classification, presenting information in ways that allows for coexistence of different competing taxonomies (e.g., tagging) is perhaps a worthy compromise: it still serves the communication requirement, but without locking into a local optimum.

[0] I don’t recall off the top of my head exactly how Iain gets there (there is plenty of material), but similar arguments were made elsewhere—e.g., Clay Shirky’s points about the inherent lossiness of any ontology and the impossible requirement to be capable of mind reading and fortune telling, or I personally would extrapolate a point from the incompleteness theorem: we cannot pick apart and formally classify a system which we ourselves are part of in a way that is complete and provably correct.

The US Library of Congress is an interesting case study to my mind. The original classification scheme came from Thomas Jefferson's private library (he donated the collection to the US Government after the original Library of Congress was burned in 1812. The classification has been made more detailed (though so far as I know the original 20 alphabetic top-level classes remain as Jefferson established them), and there's been considerable re-adjustment, as knowledge, mores, and the world around us have changed. The classification has its warts, but it's also very much a living process, something I feel is greatly underappreciated.

At the same time, the Library also has its equivalent of keywords, the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Whilst a book or work will have one and only one Classification assigned to it (the Classification serving essentially as an index and retrieval key), there may be multiple Subject Headings given (though typically only a few, say 3--6 for a given work). These are used to cross-reference works within the subject index.

The Subject Headings themselves date to 1898, and there is in fact an article on the ... er ... subject, "The LCSH Century: A Brief History of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, and Introduction to the Centennial Essays" (2009), I'm just learning as I write this comment:

<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J104v29n01_01>

I'll take requests, but I don't guarantee I'll add just anything.