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Comment by learnyearn | Hacker News Reader

Looks like 'view source' reveals the true motivation, commented out ;-)

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I wonder if he actually intended anyone to find that, except maybe his college buddies. I know that I would certainly think twice about leaving snarky comments in my resume HTML, but I imagine that “view source” was not as easy as to do in the browsers of the time (I could be wrong, too lazy to research it). Or that, even if it were easy, it would not be a routine check that a hiring manager or interviewer might conduct.

Especially when “frontend development” was not really a skill yet: in 1996, we are talking a world of HTML 3, JavaScript 1, and not even CSS 1 until later that year. HTML likely would not have been the focus of many jobs; it was literally just a way to implement hyperTEXT, so the implementation didn’t matter as long as it rendered correctly. It’d be like looking at a candidate’s PDF resume in a hex editor.

Right click to view source goes way back.

But you are right, hiring managers probably wouldn't do it.

Eh more like HTML 2.0 and yes you could view source. And the spec for the 3.x release was 3.2, not 3

No one called it JavaScript 1 or CSS 1, well maybe they called it CSS 1 by the body standards. But it was, "hey you can change text color without switching font tags with CSS!" But no one really called it, "JavaScript 1." And assuming this was last edited Jan '96, probably wouldn't have CSS in there.

Ah OK, I was just going off of a quick glance at a Wikipedia timeline.

And I’m saying “CSS 1” etc. the same way people call the original Playstation “PS1”. Hindsight is always versioned.

View Source was there in even early versions of browers. Mosaic had it. And lynx had the ability to dump the raw HTML. Most people on the web at that point also knew you could just telnet to port 80.

I would go so far to say that viewing source was the way a lot of people learned. If you saw something on the web you couldn't figure out how to do, you'd view source to learn a new trick.

I also don't think it would be a big deal to have a joke like that in your web resume. Few outside of hardcore geeks were on the web. There was no LinkedIn. Recruiters didn't use the web. Executives didn't. It was unlikely your hiring manager did & if he did, he'd likely appreciate the humor. It's like hiding a joke in kernel module you wrote. If they're the kind of people looking there, they'll have an appreciation for it.

This is the time when you came in and could quickly scan the whats new on the internet menu on mosaic :-)

Maybe he included such info originally, later thought employer might not like it so commented out

I had attended a talk by Vint Cerf at Stanford where he had posited that the reason the web took off was because people could see the HTML source of websites and start writing their own HTML.This, he believed, led to the exponential growth of web content. So, I guess then, "view source" was quite common.

That's definitely true, speaking as someone who learned HTML in '96 or 97 mostly by reading other people's HTML source.

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