Ancient Web: Bradley Kuhn Defended His 1996-Looking Homepage

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Bradley M. Kuhn knew his personal website was visually unfashionable. In 2007 he gave the internet a written explanation for why that was not necessarily a problem.

Read Why bkuhn's Website Looks Like Crap

The essay is dated December 30, 2007. Kuhn, an established free-software advocate, says the last time he put substantial effort into the appearance of his homepage was probably 1996. He does much of his work in GNU Emacs, sometimes browses in text-only mode, and does not regard visual polish as the most important feature of a personal website.

There is a practical argument hiding inside the self-deprecation. A simple, text-oriented site is easy to update, inexpensive to maintain, and more readily usable by browsers that do not support elaborate presentation. The lack of fashion also happens to make it unusually durable.

The updates are part of the joke

In a May 2008 postscript, Kuhn recounts a friend, Loïc Dachary, redesigning his own homepage. Kuhn is pleased that a 1996-style personal-information page remains and jokes about founding a webring for similarly plain sites.

Then comes an April 2012 update. Someone on a freenode IRC channel notes that Kuhn's HTML does not validate. Kuhn's response is essentially that some of it dates from 1994 or earlier and he has more important things to do.

The larger personal site remains online, with a biography, speeches, software links, RSS feeds, and information about his work in free-software licensing. It explicitly says its pages should accommodate text-based and free-software browsers. The original design argument is even linked from the current homepage.

Kuhn was not denying that modern browser technology could do useful things; the essay allows that interactive JavaScript applications have a place. He was asking a more specific question: what does a private homepage actually gain from following every design trend?

The answer is not that every website should look like his. Accessible navigation and clear content still matter, and an unmaintained page can have problems regardless of its CSS. His argument is that redesign is a choice, not a tax the internet gets to collect every five years.

A page defending its own age has now become another old-web artifact worth preserving.

Read Kuhn's original essay and its dated addenda.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.