CSSquirrel A look at web development and web design by Kyle Weems

Today, Geocities dies a quiet whimpering death after fifteen years in operation. Along with millions of really bad web pages (such as ones I once made just after high-school involving neon colors and table-based ‘designs’), it dragged screaming into the void no doubt thousands of good web pages. Now, millions of links on the Internet point to nothing, to a void from which nothing returns. It’s not the link rot apocalypse, but it’s a small glimpse into what it could look like.

Jeremy Keith has made it very clear he’s mad about this, much more so than I could ever care to muster. I’m personally glad some of my past embarrassments are now quietly euthanized, but he likes to look at the long picture. This is a picture I can’t really bring into focus myself, but today’s comic (starring Jeremy) posits a future where, tragically, Geocities held a key we needed to save humanity.

When I look at this objectively (rather then in embarrassment at my own past efforts at web “design”) I’d have to say that the tragedy here is the loss of a large chunk of late-twentieth/early twenty-first century information about our society and culture. The Internet is notable for both its size and general lack of backups. The more of it we lose, the less our great-grandchildren will know about who we were. I don’t currently have children, but if I ever did, I’d like my descendants to know I spent a great deal of time obsessing over squirrels.

It’d be more than I know about my own ancestors.