HTML House of Horror: Markup… from the FUTURE!

By Evan — — Web

Last year’s HTML House of Horror brought us the Page of the Damned, and was probably instrumental in bringing support for the MARQUEE element to Safari. What horrors will this year’s page unleash? If ye do doubt yer courage or yer strength, look nae further!

As some of you might know, my career as an experimental condensed-matter physicist ended rather abruptly in 1998. A garden-variety case of grad-school burnout… or at least, that’s what everyone was supposed to think.

The truth is that I was thrown out. When my innovative theories on the nature of spacetime came to the attention of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, the scientific orthodoxy moved quickly to silence me. I was turned out on the street, with naught but a spare cryopump and a broken dilution refrigerator to my name. They called me mad, mad! Fools! I’ve showed them all!

As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with quantum mechanics knows, probing the structure of events at the Planck scale requires tremendous power. Back-of-the-envelope calculations estimate that such experiments would require an accelerator the size of the galaxy, but such old-fashioned “reality-based physics” is no match for faith-based physics, physics forged by pure Strength and Will.

My first, failed experiments in early 2001 did have noticeable effects on the California power grid, and for that temporary inconvenience, I apologize. Despite those early setbacks, I managed to steadily lower power consumption and increase the sensitivity of the device. By the summer of 2003, I was able to probe the seething quantum foam itself. And I managed to confirm my theory that the foam resonates weakly in the wake of electromagnetic disturbances… electromagnetic disturbances from another slice of spacetime.

After another year of tuning, and the development of signal-processing algorithms the likes of which would make grown IEEE Fellows weep, I was able to detect actual electronic signals from the future. It has taken weeks of calculation, but my poor, aged G4 PowerMac has finally succeeded in decoding a fragment of an actual HTTP packet exchange. Look upon the works of the future, ye markup geeks, and despair.

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.3; Windows NT 6.1)
Host: grandpahenry.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:39:26 GMT
Server: Apache/1.4.1 (Unix)
Last-Modified: Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:18:11 GMT
ETag: "2f51cd-924-381e1af6"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-length: 4211
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 2.0//EN" "TBD">
<HTML>
<BODY background=bassfish.gif leftmargin=0 rightmargin=0 topmargin=0>
<CENTER><b><BLINK><font size=7>Grandpa Henry's Fishin' Page!</b></font></CENTER>
<nl>
<LI HREF="fishing.htm">Fishing main
<LI HREF=rainbo1.htm>Rainbow Trout
<LI HREF=rod.htm>Rods and reels
<LI HREF=spots.htm>Best fishing spots
<LI HREF="grandkids.htm">Cody and Gavin!
</NL>

Well I'm back from taking little Cody & Gavin fishing, and we had a blast! We've got new pictures and more, including little Gavin's <font color="RED">FIRST TROUT</font>!<p>

<BIG href="/troutpics.html">CLICK HERE FOR PICS!
...

Happy Halloween!

5 thoughts on “HTML House of Horror: Markup… from the FUTURE!”

  1. Well Evan, XHTML 2.0 may still try our faith four years ahead, but your future snapshot should not cause us doubt. Just as you hinted at a year and a half earlier, that pesky, useless <a> tag will no longer be with us in the glorious XHTML future.

    I was also going to warn you about the dangers of observing (and therefore altering) events outside the flow of time, but instead I’m going to add CSS2 pseudoclasses to my 1997 Geocities homepage. Don’t step on anything!

  2. No worries about altering the flow of time, Mike! We are on a closed timelike curve; my posting of Oct. 30, 2004 is just one event in a long causal chain of events that will inevitably lead to Grandpa Henry’s bastardized web page four years hence.

    (Unless little Cody manages to grow up, build a time machine, go back to 1970, and accidentally kill his Grandpa Henry. But let’s not hold our breath.)

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