2026-07-06 11:32 UTC
“This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the #ViewSource function that came built into every #browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced #HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.”
Replies (1)
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@eliasulrich@hachyderm.io 2026-07-06 11:36
“Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from #unwrapping the membrane and exposing #thecode beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.”