Not everything in an Ancient Web dig has to be ancient. Sometimes a modern developer rebuilds an older computing idea carefully enough to show why it worked in the first place.
Matt Kane’s homepage looks like a black-and-white HyperCard stack escaped from an early Macintosh and somehow acquired links to GitHub, Bluesky and modern web tooling.
That is deliberate.
Kane’s own “HyperSite” explanation says the design is based on a 1990 HyperCard stack. HyperCard was Apple’s pre-Web hypermedia system built around linked cards, interactive elements and the HyperTalk scripting language. Kane says it was where he first learned to code useful things around 1991, and that the Web therefore felt familiar when he encountered it a few years later.
The site’s footer beginning its copyright line at 1991 is part of the joke and autobiography. This is not a claim that mk.gg has been sitting untouched on the public Web since 1991.
The retro interface is running very modern machinery
The interesting part is how seriously the reconstruction is treated.
Kane says the fonts, icons and graphics are based on originals from the 1980s, including work associated with Susan Kare. He credits recreated Chicago and Geneva fonts, HyperCard graphics, Infinite Mac and other sources that helped him reproduce the environment. Flying toaster animation appears because apparently no reconstruction of old Macintosh culture is legally complete without toast crossing the screen.
Underneath all that, the site is built with Astro and, according to Kane, ships zero client-side JavaScript.
That contrast is useful. Retro web design is often reduced to putting a tiled GIF behind a page and calling it 1996. mk.gg instead borrows an older interaction model: cards, simple controls, monochrome graphics, visible navigation and a small number of understandable elements. The result feels old because the conceptual vocabulary is old, not because the CSS is deliberately broken.
Kane is not a nostalgia-only developer either. His bio describes more than 25 years building for the Web, work on modern frameworks and developer tools, and a current role at Cloudflare. The old interface is being recreated by somebody who knows exactly what contemporary web stacks can do and intentionally chooses restraint on his personal site.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list mostly points backward. This one is useful in the opposite direction. It demonstrates that old interface ideas can still be technically coherent rather than merely decorative.
HyperCard never became the Web.
But when you look at a page like this, the family resemblance is hard to miss.