antinomian.com

I’ve gotten pretty into reading the online archives from the first couple years of Wired Magazine recently, and while the content from this period is consistently fascinating, I’m growing increasingly annoyed with the broke-ass HTML formatting that riddles these texts. Some examples:

• Will Wright Discusses SimCity2K & predicts MMOs in 1994 - Awesome! But the “font size=2 face=”verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif” color=”#FF0000″ garbage that crops up in between every paragraph has really got to go!
• 1993’s “3DO: Hip or Hype?” lays the groundwork for what would eventually become a viable business model 13 years later on XBox Live - Great! But what is with the unrendered “bold” tags around each heading & the fact that each subsequent bulleted list migrates one level further to the right. Also, I’m pretty sure that the bullets on the last page of that article are orphaned from elsewhere in the text!
• By 1995 some of the articles appear to be “fixed” but the monthly featurettes like Rants & Raves & Wired Top 10 remain 100% fucked up. (Note that the template is so broken on that last link that the footer renders *behind* the sidebar
• The .sig file of the month from Issue 2.01’s Net Surf column should probably be in a mono-spaced font & Ok… hahaha j/k on this one, but for comparison’s sake the link to download NCSA Mosaic in this same column STILL FRICKING WORKS!!
• By 1999, things are appearing much more sane in the HTML department, but unfortunately this coincides with the content’s slow decline into tabloid irrelevance, viz 50 Ways to Spend a Lot of Money
• Articles from the near-present-day appear in their “original” format on the site, with images & related links intact, though there is still some roughness around the edges (YouTube embeds are squashed into a non-standard size, for example, causing the playback controls to get cropped)

So anyway… While I’m incredibly grateful that the text of these articles is available for free (not counting the horrific, animated, content-obscuring overlay ads that frequently appear) online, I really do wish there was some way to pretty up the presentation just a tiny bit, particularly on the really cool issues from the first couple years. But I’m sure Condé Nast has more profitable things to do than futz around with preserving obsolete cultural artifacts of interest to a few dorks, geeks & “futurists.”

In conclusion, will everybody please refrain from bidding up the price of 1993-2000 back issues of Wired on eBay for a little while? Even if they do get around to cleaning up the online archives, I think I’d prefer my copies in the original reflective-silver ink on a hot pink background thank you very much and goodnight!

UPDATE: The very last paragraph in the Will Wright article from 1994 is so incredibly brilliant that it makes me want to barf: “I have in mind a game I want to call ‘Doll House.’ It gives grown-ups some tools to design what is basically a doll house. But a doll house for adults may not be very marketable.” LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!