I think the reason is that the original intention behind HTML was to be a quickly written markup language to present and share research. With minimal styling like text size, paragraphs, some bold or italics for emphasis and images. Anything going beyond that is for commercial rather than academic purposes.

To add to that, markup was intended to be semantic, not for layout, and the expectation was the browser would do the right thing to present it to the user. I think you are right that they are in that early mindset before browser decided to become pixel perfect typesetting engines. Why should I tell you how wide a <paragraph> should be?!? Browser knows best if it's on a small monitor, big monitor, phone, etc. Sigh.

I always assumed it was down to them creating their homepages early on (as in: the mid-to-late 90s) and having gotten used to editing the raw HTML file using vi/emacs/ed/whatever when they needed to update it. And they never had a reason to change that workflow.

My oldest, still active, website was created in that style around 20 years ago and only in recent years did I change to a git and ansible based deployment instead of just editing the raw files on the server over ssh.

I think even if he had time, he wouldn't change that page much. _simplicity_ is his philosophy. A page that you can edit with the most basic tools and publish in terminal is totally aligned with that. The page does its job, anything else is unnecessary clutter.

I mean you can't argue with it. If you want a page like this, you only need to know HTML, FTP, a text editor.

Meanwhile my attempted personal website, 'simply' github pages, also requires you to know about Hugo, which requires a ruby runtime locally; markdown, css, js, Git, Github, Github's two-factor authentication, etc.

I mean it won't win any design awards but basic html for infrequently updated websites is absolutely fine.

Unstyled or almost unstyled HTML home page is basically standard practice among (especially older) academics, CS or not. Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost elaborately designed by academic standards.

> Don Knuth's home page with custom colors is almost elaborately designed by academic standards

Yeah, or Tanenbaum's.

You’re seeing (and falling for) an ego-trip that is not there. All CS professors have webpages like this one.

This is 100% the case. I wouldn't be surprised if universities actually have a policy against not customizing profile pages. Otherwise you're opening things up to the good old Geocities age.

Sigh... was the personal attack really necessary?

I see these pages, all the time, with tech heavyweights that aren't teachers. I won't bother tracking them down, but I've been seeing them for years.

I don't think it's an ego-trip. These folks really are that busy, and this stuff just isn't important. Some, however, I am sure, have ego trips. I don't really care. I'm not inviting them over for dinner, and they probably wouldn't come, if I did.

The ego trip is more with sites like mine, where I take the time to polish it up. It's more important to me, than it is to them.

Some of them actually have fairly current-looking pages, because they work[ed] for companies (or schools) that have templates[0].

Also, he isn't my "hero." I mean, seriously...

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150312003109/http://research.g...

It's the equivalent of senior law firm partners leaving simple typos in their emails to junior staff.