First Webpage

A fossil with fresh paint, and the seam is marked

The markup is the original, committed on 15 October 2020. The styling isn't: there was no stylesheet at all for the page's first six years, so until 2026 anyone who opened it saw browser-default text at browser-default sizes. I corrected two things in the content in place instead of leaving them, each with a dated comment where it appears, because leaving them would have been misleading rather than nostalgic. The contact form posted to a mailto action, which browsers have since stopped honouring outright, so it's a plain link now, with the original fields kept and disabled as a record of what it asked for. And the bio said I was an engineering student in Bangalore, which was true when I wrote it; the line stays, with a dated note under it saying the degree is finished. It's the same rule the rebuilt booking system's schema follows, where every departure from the recovered original is marked as new: an artifact you've edited silently isn't an artifact any more.

What a first page actually looks like

Specifics, because the general version is worthless. Five tables, including tables nested inside the cells of other tables, doing layout: the photograph beside the name, and a skills grid built as a table of tables. Spacing carried by cellspacing attributes on the markup, since CSS wasn't in the picture yet. Skill levels shown as literal star characters typed into table cells. Not one semantic sectioning element in the file: no main, no nav, no header, no footer, no section. And a table row opened and never closed, which every browser quietly recovers from, and that's exactly why it sat there unnoticed for six years. What it got right is worth saying too, and it's not nothing: a doctype, a character set declaration, and alt text on the photograph, which plenty of professional pages still can't manage.

This one stays as it is

Two other projects on this site are restorations. Both were rebuilt because they claimed to work and didn't: an admin panel open to anyone, and a model that had learned the room instead of the body. This page claims nothing. Rewriting it with semantic elements and a grid would produce a page that lies about when it was written, and its only job here is to be the far end of a distance: the same person, six years apart, with a browser and no idea what he was doing. Keeping it costs one static file, and it's the most honest thing in the list.