The-Pope.com is mostly known for religious material, but buried inside it is something far more relevant to Internet archaeology: Griff Ruby’s documentation of obsolete HTML and the browser wars that produced it.
Open the site’s old HTML-source page
Ruby’s broader Lost Tags of HTML material treats extinct markup like technological fossils. Tags appeared, disappeared, competed, became browser-specific, or were replaced by cleaner standards. A Web developer working today can look at <blink> or <marquee> as punch lines. On old pages, they were once perfectly ordinary tools.
The history matters because HTML did not arrive as one finished language and then proceed neatly through numbered versions. Netscape, Microsoft, browser vendors, standards groups, and individual developers pulled it in different directions. Some tags existed because one browser company shipped them first and dared everyone else to catch up.
Ruby documented that mess rather than pretending the Web evolved according to a clean architectural diagram.
The work has been noticed outside the site. The Web Ahead highlighted The Lost Tags of HTML in 2015, and later scholarship on Web semantics has cited Ruby’s page as a reference on abandoned markup.
Old HTML is easier to understand when somebody remembers why it existed
A specification can tell you that a tag is obsolete. A historical page can tell you what people were trying to accomplish with it.
That distinction becomes important when maintaining or restoring old sites. Ancient source code contains tags, attributes, layout hacks, browser checks, and invalid structures that make much more sense once you remember the environment they were written for. Developers were not necessarily incompetent. They were targeting Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Mosaic descendants, and standards that were still moving underneath them.
This is one reason old personal sites remain useful even when their main subject is unrelated to computing. Somebody tucked a detailed technical essay into a corner twenty years ago, search engines mostly forgot about it, and it survived because the domain survived.
The exact source page here is suitably strange-looking. The surrounding HTML history is the real prize.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps turning up these accidental archives: information preserved not by a dedicated museum but because somebody never deleted the directory.
For anyone who has ever opened a 1990s page and wondered what the hell the source code was doing, Ruby’s work is worth the detour.