New ask Hacker News story: "Hacking" the source code of Paul Graham's homepage

"Hacking" the source code of Paul Graham's homepage
3 by reconnecting | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Today on HN, I started a discussion about handmade webpages, and one of the examples was Paul Graham's website (https://ift.tt/ZMPk9Q0). I decided to take a closer look and found several interesting artefacts. 0. Security. Instead of creating his own transparent 1x1 pixel gif for spacing (which is not the easiest task in 2025), Paul's website uses an IMG link from virtumundo.com (https://ift.tt/HeM3phV). So, if the owner of the virtumundo server receives a lot of requests, it's because of Paul Graham's homepage. It's also possible that Virtumundo might monitor the activity of Paul's visitors and their IP addresses through IMG requests log. 1. Declaration. The HTML version is not declared correctly, as the `` tag is related to HTML5, but the website uses a more or less HTML 4.01 version. 2. Comments. There are a lot of interesting comments, such as "Follow me at @paulg@mas.to" and "Paul Graham, like nobody else, tells us what it means to be a hacker.- Matthias Felleisen." 3. Syntax. The HTML has poor syntax, and many tags have incorrect syntax according to the HTML specification. (Ex. bgcolor=#ff9922, or
tag use inside of . Overall, the HTML code on the page is quite messy, I but understand how difficult it can be to find an expert in HTML 4.01 these days. Paul, if you read this, please don't hesitate to get in touch if you need assistance with fixing the issues.

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