yahew.com View source

View source

This page has no author stylesheet and no script. Press Ctrl+U, or Cmd+Option+U, and you can read the whole thing. It will take about a minute. That was the normal condition of the web. Everything you are looking at is your own browser's opinion about what markup should look like.

The stylesheet that is running right now

Your browser is applying a stylesheet nobody shipped. It is in the HTML living standard, section 15, and this part governs every link you have ever seen:

:link { color: #0000EE; }
:visited { color: #551A8B; }
:link:active, :visited:active { color: #FF0000; }
:link, :visited { text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; }

#551A8B is a 1994 Mosaic and Netscape value that was never rounded off and is now specification text. Thirty years of every browser agreeing on an arbitrary purple, because changing it would break the one piece of state a page keeps about you without asking: which links you already followed.

A few lines on, about a neighboring value, the spec says plainly: this color is just a suggestion.

CSS did not choose the blue

The same rule in the W3C's CSS 2.1 sample stylesheet, the historical baseline for what a browser was expected to do:

html, address, blockquote, body, dd, div, dl, dt, fieldset, form,
frame, frameset, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, noframes, ol, p, ul, center,
dir, hr, menu, pre   { display: block; unicode-bidi: embed }
li { display: list-item }
head { display: none }
:link, :visited { text-decoration: underline }

Read the last line. text-decoration: underline and no color at all. The blue was never CSS's, it belonged to the browsers, and the standard only wrote it down decades later by describing what everyone already did. Chromium still does not put the value in its stylesheet: it says color: -webkit-link and lets the platform resolve it.

The browser used to overrule you on purpose

From Netscape's own authoring documentation, 1997, on background and text colors:

The default coloring of these is: LINK=blue, VLINK=purple, and ALINK=red.

Named colors, not hex. And then the sentence that matters:

if the background image is not loaded for any reason, and a BGCOLOR was not also specified, then any of the foreground controlling attributes (LINK, VLINK, and ALINK) will be ignored.

Netscape shipped a rule that silently throws away the author's color choices, and documented it as a feature. The reasoning, typo and all: setting your requested text colors on top a the default gray background may well make your document unreadable.

That default background was gray. Netscape says so in prose, repeatedly. This plate gives you no hex for it, because no primary source states one: not Netscape's documentation, not the WHATWG spec, not Chromium's stylesheet or Firefox's. Authors wrote bgcolor="#FFFFFF" specifically to escape it.

Still shipping

The top of berkshirehathaway.com, fetched on 2 August 2026, running in production at a company worth close to a trillion dollars:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html><head><title>BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.</title>
<meta content="text/html; charset=unicode" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828"></head>
<body link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000080" vlink="#ff0000">
<b><font size="6"><p align="center">B</font><font size="4">ERKSHIRE </font>...

HTML 4.0 Transitional: A doctype from 1997, still declared.
MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828: The page was authored in Internet Explorer 8's editing component and never re-saved. The tool that made it has not existed for over a decade.
charset=unicode: Not a valid charset label. It has never mattered.
Color attributes on the body, not CSS: link="#800080", text="#000080", vlink="#ff0000". They deliberately overrode the defaults.
Small caps faked with two font sizes: <font size="6">B</font><font size="4">ERKSHIRE</font>, the same trick splash pages used in 1996.

It has outlived every framework that would have replaced it. The only modern thing on the page is a Google Analytics snippet, injected above the doctype.

This page contains itself

Below is the source of this document: the actual bytes your browser was sent, pasted back in after the build. As delivered, before it grew a copy of itself, this page was 16,657 bytes, 304 lines, 0 script tags, 4,262 bytes of CSS. That CSS figure covers the return bar and the prev/next arrows this guide puts on every plate; the plate's own contribution is the two rules at the bottom.

Somewhere in there is the placeholder where this block gets inserted, still empty, because the copy was taken one step before the insertion. A document that contains itself cannot contain the containing.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" data-plate>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">
    <title>View source | YAHEW!</title>
    <meta name="description" content="This page has no stylesheet. Press Ctrl+U and you can read all of it.">
    <link rel="canonical" href="https://yahew.com/plates/view-source/">
    <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/favicon-32.png">
    <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="/favicon-16.png">
    <meta property="og:title" content="View source | YAHEW!">
    <meta property="og:description" content="This page has no stylesheet. Press Ctrl+U and you can read all of it.">
    <meta property="og:type" content="article">
    <style>
      /* Only what the return bar needs. Plates style everything else. */
      *, *::before, *::after { box-sizing: border-box; }
      html, body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-height: 100%; }
      body { padding-top: 0; }

      /* Every plate ends with a link to its own source note, which now lives
         at a citable URL instead of below the fold. Styled here so it looks the
         same on all of them regardless of the plate's own palette. */
      .plate-sources {
        margin: 26px 0 0; padding-top: 14px;
        border-top: 1px solid currentColor; opacity: .6;
        font: 11px/1.5 Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; letter-spacing: .04em;
        text-align: center;
      }
      .plate-sources a { color: inherit; }

      .plate-return {
        position: fixed; top: 0; left: 50%; transform: translateX(-50%);
        z-index: 2147483000;
        display: inline-flex; align-items: center; gap: 7px;
        padding: 5px 14px 6px;
        font: 11px/1 Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; letter-spacing: .08em;
        text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;
        border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, .55); border-top: 0;
        border-radius: 0 0 3px 3px;
        background: #fffdf2; color: #221c1c;
      }
      .plate-return:hover, .plate-return:focus-visible {
        background: #221c1c; color: #fffdf2;
      }
      .plate-return .pr-arrow { font-size: 10px; }
      .plate-return .pr-name {
        opacity: .6; padding-left: 7px; margin-left: 1px;
        border-left: 1px solid currentColor;
      }
      html[data-plate-dark] .plate-return {
        background: #14141a; color: #f2f2ee; border-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, .45);
      }
      html[data-plate-dark] .plate-return:hover,
      html[data-plate-dark] .plate-return:focus-visible {
        background: #f2f2ee; color: #14141a;
      }
      @media (max-width: 520px) {
        .plate-return .pr-name { display: none; }
      }

      /* Step to the neighboring plate. These live in the empty margin beside
         the text column, which is space the plates were not using anyway.
         z-index deliberately sits below every overlay any plate declares. The
         lowest of those is the splash gate at 40, and the custom cursor plate
         uses 5 upward, so this sits at 4: a threshold meant to fill the screen
         must not have Prev and Next chrome floating on top of it. */
      .plate-step {
        /* A plate that docks something to the bottom of the window sets
           --plate-dock to its height, and these lift clear of it. The search
           plate's editor bar was sitting on top of both arrows. */
        position: fixed; bottom: calc(18px + var(--plate-dock, 0px)); z-index: 4;
        display: flex; align-items: center; gap: 8px;
        max-width: 15rem; padding: 8px 12px;
        font: 11px/1.35 Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; letter-spacing: .05em;
        text-decoration: none;
        border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);
        background: #fffdf2; color: #221c1c;
      }
      .plate-step-prev { left: 14px; }
      .plate-step-next { right: 14px; flex-direction: row-reverse; }
      .plate-step:hover, .plate-step:focus-visible { background: #221c1c; color: #fffdf2; }
      .plate-step .ps-chev { font-size: 15px; line-height: 1; flex: none; }
      .plate-step .ps-txt { display: flex; flex-direction: column; gap: 1px; min-width: 0; }
      .plate-step-next .ps-txt { text-align: right; }
      .plate-step .ps-lbl { text-transform: uppercase; opacity: .55; font-size: 9px; }
      .plate-step .ps-name { overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap; }
      html[data-plate-dark] .plate-step {
        background: #14141a; color: #f2f2ee; border-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, .4);
      }
      html[data-plate-dark] .plate-step:hover,
      html[data-plate-dark] .plate-step:focus-visible { background: #f2f2ee; color: #14141a; }

      /* Below this there is no spare margin to put them in, and they would sit
         on top of the plate instead of beside it. */
      @media (max-width: 1100px) { .plate-step { display: none; } }

      @media print { .plate-return, .plate-step { display: none; } }
    </style>
    
  <style>body{margin:8px}pre[data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr]{overflow-x:auto}
</style></head>
  <body>
    <a class="plate-return" href="/">
      <span class="pr-arrow" aria-hidden="true">&#9650;</span>
      <span>yahew.com</span>
      <span class="pr-name">View source</span>
    </a>
    
  <h1 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>View source</h1>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>This page has no author stylesheet and no script.</strong> Press <kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>U</kbd>, or <kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Cmd</kbd>+<kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Option</kbd>+<kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>U</kbd>,
  and you can read the whole thing. It will take about a minute. That was the
  normal condition of the web. Everything you are looking at is your own
  browser's opinion about what markup should look like.</p>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <h2 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>The stylesheet that is running right now</h2>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Your browser is applying a stylesheet nobody shipped. It is in the HTML
  living standard, section 15, and this part governs every link you have ever
  seen:</p>

  <pre data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>:link { color: #0000EE; }
:visited { color: #551A8B; }
:link:active, :visited:active { color: #FF0000; }
:link, :visited { text-decoration: underline; cursor: pointer; }</pre>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>#551A8B</code> is a 1994 Mosaic and Netscape value that was never
  rounded off and is now specification text. Thirty years of every browser
  agreeing on an arbitrary purple, because changing it would break the one piece
  of state a page keeps about you without asking: which links you already
  followed.</p>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>A few lines on, about a neighboring value, the spec says plainly: <q data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>this color is just a suggestion</q>.</p>

  <h2 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>CSS did not choose the blue</h2>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>The same rule in the W3C's CSS 2.1 sample stylesheet, the historical
  baseline for what a browser was expected to do:</p>

  <pre data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>html, address, blockquote, body, dd, div, dl, dt, fieldset, form,
frame, frameset, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, noframes, ol, p, ul, center,
dir, hr, menu, pre   { display: block; unicode-bidi: embed }
li { display: list-item }
head { display: none }
:link, :visited { text-decoration: underline }</pre>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Read the last line. <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>text-decoration: underline</code> and <strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>no
  color at all</strong>. The blue was never CSS's, it belonged to the browsers,
  and the standard only wrote it down decades later by describing what everyone
  already did. Chromium still does not put the value in its stylesheet: it
  says <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>color: -webkit-link</code> and lets the platform resolve it.</p>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <h2 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>The browser used to overrule you on purpose</h2>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>From Netscape's own authoring documentation, 1997, on background and text
  colors:</p>

  <blockquote data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>
    <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>The default coloring of these is: LINK=blue, VLINK=purple, and ALINK=red.</p>
  </blockquote>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Named colors, not hex. And then the sentence that matters:</p>

  <blockquote data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>
    <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>if the background image is not loaded for any reason, and a BGCOLOR was
    not also specified, then any of the foreground controlling attributes (LINK,
    VLINK, and ALINK) will be ignored.</p>
  </blockquote>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Netscape shipped a rule that <strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>silently throws away the author's color
  choices</strong>, and documented it as a feature. The reasoning, typo and
  all: <q data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>setting your requested text colors on top a the default gray
  background may well make your document unreadable</q>.</p>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>That default background was gray. Netscape says so in prose, repeatedly.
  This plate gives you no hex for it, because no primary source states one: not
  Netscape's documentation, not the WHATWG spec, not Chromium's stylesheet or
  Firefox's. Authors wrote <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>bgcolor="#FFFFFF"</code> specifically to escape it.</p>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <h2 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Still shipping</h2>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>The top of <a href="https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/" target="_blank" data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>berkshirehathaway.com</a>, fetched on 2 August 2026, running
  in production at a company worth close to a trillion dollars:</p>

  <pre data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC &quot;-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN&quot;&gt;
&lt;html&gt;&lt;head&gt;&lt;title&gt;BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC.&lt;/title&gt;
&lt;meta content=&quot;text/html; charset=unicode&quot; http-equiv=&quot;Content-Type&quot;&gt;
&lt;meta name=&quot;GENERATOR&quot; content=&quot;MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828&quot;&gt;&lt;/head&gt;
&lt;body link=&quot;#800080&quot; bgcolor=&quot;#ffffff&quot; text=&quot;#000080&quot; vlink=&quot;#ff0000&quot;&gt;
&lt;b&gt;&lt;font size=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&lt;p align=&quot;center&quot;&gt;B&lt;/font&gt;&lt;font size=&quot;4&quot;&gt;ERKSHIRE &lt;/font&gt;...</pre>

  <dl data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>
    <dt data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>HTML 4.0 Transitional</strong></dt>
    <dd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>A doctype from 1997, still declared.</dd>

    <dt data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828</strong></dt>
    <dd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>The page was authored in Internet Explorer 8's editing component and
    never re-saved. The tool that made it has not existed for over a decade.</dd>

    <dt data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>charset=unicode</strong></dt>
    <dd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Not a valid charset label. It has never mattered.</dd>

    <dt data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Color attributes on the body, not CSS</strong></dt>
    <dd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>link="#800080"</code>, <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>text="#000080"</code>,
    <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>vlink="#ff0000"</code>. They deliberately overrode the defaults.</dd>

    <dt data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Small caps faked with two font sizes</strong></dt>
    <dd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>&lt;font size="6"&gt;B&lt;/font&gt;&lt;font size="4"&gt;ERKSHIRE&lt;/font&gt;</code>,
    the same trick splash pages used in 1996.</dd>
  </dl>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>It has outlived every framework that would have replaced it. The only
  modern thing on the page is a Google Analytics snippet, injected above the
  doctype.</p>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <h2 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>This page contains itself</h2>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Below is the source of this document: the actual bytes your browser was
  sent, pasted back in after the build. As delivered, before it grew a copy of
  itself, this page was <strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>SELF_SOURCE_STATS</strong>. That CSS figure
  covers the return bar and the prev/next arrows this guide puts on every plate;
  the plate's own contribution is the two rules at the bottom.</p>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Somewhere in there is the placeholder where this block gets inserted, still
  empty, because the copy was taken one step before the insertion. A document
  that contains itself cannot contain the containing.</p>

  <pre data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>SELF_SOURCE_GOES_HERE</pre>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>It is indented, too. Astro collapses whitespace between tags by default, so
  this guide used to ship every page as one unbroken wall. That is switched off
  site wide now, at about 1.4 KB per page before compression.</p>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <h2 class="marks" data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Field marks: how to tell if a page is readable</h2>

  <div data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>
    <ul data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>
      <li data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Line breaks in the markup.</strong> One unbroken line means a
      build step, not a person.</li>
      <li data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Class names you can pronounce.</strong> <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>nav</code> and <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>footer</code> were written by a person.
      <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>css-1x3kf9a</code> was generated.</li>
      <li data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Indentation that means something.</strong> Nesting that lines
      up is a person's mental model, preserved.</li>
      <li data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Comments.</strong> A build step strips them. Their presence
      proves you are reading the original.</li>
      <li data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>A doctype older than the site's traffic.</strong> HTML 4.0
      Transitional in 2026 means nobody has had to touch it.</li>
      <li data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><strong data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Presentational attributes on the elements themselves.</strong>
      <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>bgcolor</code>, <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>link</code>, <code data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>align</code>. Ugly by modern
      standards, and completely legible without a stylesheet.</li>
    </ul>
  </div>

  <h2 data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>What it solved, and what took it</h2>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>You could not right click a television and read how the program was made,
  but every page you liked would show you exactly how, for free and without
  asking anyone. Nearly everyone who built for the web before about 2012 learned
  this way, from strangers who never knew they were teaching.</p>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Nothing was taken away. <kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>U</kbd> still works everywhere.
  What changed is what it shows you: not the thing a person wrote, but the thing
  a build step emitted, minified, hashed class names, no line breaks, the real
  source in a repository you may not be able to see. That was not a decision, it
  was an accumulation of individually reasonable choices, and this site makes the
  same tradeoff. A curious twelve year old who presses <kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>U</kbd>
  today learns nothing, because there is nothing left to read.</p>

  <p data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><a href="/" data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Back to the directory.</a></p>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <hr data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>

  <p class="plate-sources" data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr><a href="/plates/view-source/sources/" data-astro-cid-pmiwytpr>Sources, and what is deliberately absent</a></p>



    <a class="plate-step plate-step-prev" href="/plates/splash-page/" aria-label="Previous plate: The splash page">
        <span class="ps-chev" aria-hidden="true">&#8249;</span>
        <span class="ps-txt">
          <span class="ps-lbl">Prev</span>
          <span class="ps-name">The splash page</span>
        </span>
      </a>
    <a class="plate-step plate-step-next" href="/plates/link-rot/" aria-label="Next plate: Link rot">
        <span class="ps-chev" aria-hidden="true">&#8250;</span>
        <span class="ps-txt">
          <span class="ps-lbl">Next</span>
          <span class="ps-name">Link rot</span>
        </span>
      </a>
  </body>
</html>

It is indented, too. Astro collapses whitespace between tags by default, so this guide used to ship every page as one unbroken wall. That is switched off site wide now, at about 1.4 KB per page before compression.

Field marks: how to tell if a page is readable

Line breaks in the markup. One unbroken line means a build step, not a person.
Class names you can pronounce. nav and footer were written by a person. css-1x3kf9a was generated.
Indentation that means something. Nesting that lines up is a person's mental model, preserved.
Comments. A build step strips them. Their presence proves you are reading the original.
A doctype older than the site's traffic. HTML 4.0 Transitional in 2026 means nobody has had to touch it.
Presentational attributes on the elements themselves. bgcolor, link, align. Ugly by modern standards, and completely legible without a stylesheet.

What it solved, and what took it

You could not right click a television and read how the program was made, but every page you liked would show you exactly how, for free and without asking anyone. Nearly everyone who built for the web before about 2012 learned this way, from strangers who never knew they were teaching.

Nothing was taken away. Ctrl+U still works everywhere. What changed is what it shows you: not the thing a person wrote, but the thing a build step emitted, minified, hashed class names, no line breaks, the real source in a repository you may not be able to see. That was not a decision, it was an accumulation of individually reasonable choices, and this site makes the same tradeoff. A curious twelve year old who presses Ctrl+U today learns nothing, because there is nothing left to read.

Back to the directory.

Sources, and what is deliberately absent

Prev The splash page Next Link rot