The web's first format is its best one — written off for a decade, now written fluently by every AI agent on earth. Scroll: the page changes its decade as you go.
Every format that tried to replace it is a museum piece. Flash is dead. Silverlight is dead. The app you built in 2016 won't compile. The page from 1991 still loads.
This whole exhibition is one HTML file, by the way. View source any time. That's the point.
A physicist at CERN wants to share documents with other physicists. He invents a format so simple you can learn it in an afternoon, and so durable that his first page still loads today — on every device, in milliseconds. No app store approved it.
The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.
Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists, Policy, November's W3 news, Frequently Asked Questions.
What's out there? — Pointers to the world's online information
The average page today is over 2 MB — a thousand times heavier — to do roughly the same thing: show you words you came to read.
GeoCities. Guestbooks. Hit counters with too many digits. Every page looked exactly like the person who made it, because the person who made it wrote every tag by hand — and View Source was the most generous classroom ever built.
<marquee> was never in any standard. Browsers still render it today, because removing it would break someone's homepage from 1997. That's the contract HTML keeps: your page stays up.
The CSS Zen Garden hands designers one fixed HTML file and a dare: make it beautiful without touching it. Hundreds do — each one unrecognizable from the last. Structure and style part ways, and the document underneath never changes.
Littering a dark and dreary road lay the past relics of browser-specific tags, incompatible DOMs, and broken CSS support. Today, we must clear the mind of past practices: the same markup, reborn each time the stylesheet changes.
This is the superpower everything else forgot: content that outlives its costume. No rewrite, no migration, no framework upgrade. Just a different dress on the same document.
The smart money said the web's future was plugins — Flash for anything alive, Silverlight for anything serious. HTML5 answered with native video, native drawing, and tags that mean something. The plugins are gone. The format that buried them is the one from 1991.
Every format that tried to replace HTML needed a runtime, a license, or a corporation to stay alive. HTML only needed a browser — and everything has a browser.
Somewhere along the way, writing HTML by hand became embarrassing. It turned into a compile target — generated by a framework, bundled by a bundler, hydrated by a runtime. We needed fourteen hundred packages to say hello.
Nothing against frameworks — apps need them. But somewhere in the decade of toolchains we forgot that a document never did. One file was always enough. It just stopped being cool to say so.
Then something funny happened. The most advanced software ever built — AI agents that can write anything — chose to hand you their work as single HTML files. Self-contained, portable, viewable anywhere. The handmade format came back, made by new hands.
The catch: the sidebar is where those pages go to die. Scroll up far enough and this quarter's masterpiece is gone — unversioned, unlinkable, unfindable. Thirty-five years of durability, lost to a chat scrollback.
No compiler, no install, no permission needed. Type on the left; the web happens on the right. This is still how it works — that's the miracle.
The classroom is still open. View Source never closed.
Wovo is a library for the HTML your agents make — every page gets a live link, a version history, and a shelf your whole team can search. In fact, the page you're reading is one of them: a single HTML file, deployed with the same command as everything else, badge and all.
npx @gowovo/wovo deploy ./love-letter.html