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The user agent stylesheet is quoted verbatim from the WHATWG HTML living standard, section 15 Rendering, which is licensed CC-BY 4.0 and is the only cleanly licensed stylesheet in this plate's reference folder. That is why it is the one quoted, rather than Chromium's html.css (BSD-3-Clause), Firefox's (MPL-2.0) or the W3C's, which carries a restrictive document license. The CSS 2.1 sample stylesheet is quoted for reference under attribution. The Netscape passages are from home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/bg/index.html, Wayback capture dated 1 July 1997, quoted exactly, including on top a the, which is theirs. The Berkshire Hathaway markup was fetched live on 2 August 2026 and is quoted as evidence, not reproduced as a template. All files are in reference/4-construction/view-source/.

This plate argues from the default your browser applies today, not the one Netscape applied in 1995. Ship a page with genuinely no CSS and you inherit modern white and a serif face, which is not the period look. Narrating gray while showing white would be dishonest, so the plate shows you what you actually have and tells you separately what it used to be.

There are exactly two author style rules on this page, and neither of them styles anything. The first restores the eight pixel body margin that this guide's plate layout removes, because without it the text runs into the edge of the window, which is not a browser default either. The second sets overflow-x: auto on pre, because code samples do not wrap by default and on a phone they push the whole document sideways, taking the prose with them. Scrolling the block instead of the page was the smallest honest fix, and it was found by testing rather than assumed. Every other thing you see here, the type, the sizes, the blue, the purple, the rules, the list markers, is your browser. The built page contains no JavaScript at all.

The self-source block is produced after the build, not during it. scripts/inject-self-source.mjs reads the finished dist/plates/view-source/index.html, measures it, escapes it and writes it back into the placeholder, which is why the byte count describes the page before it contained itself. Turning off Astro's compressHTML was part of the same change and affects every page in the guide.

Deliberately absent. A hex value for the old default gray. Netscape's documentation says gray in prose and never gives a number, and the value that circulates does not appear in any primary source reachable from here. Also absent: any claim about when view source stopped being common, or what share of pages are minified today, because neither is in these references.

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