A deliberate appeal to the tastes of hackers?

I like the idea but if you check archive.org it used to render normally :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20130218230607/http://newos.org/

The problem with doing it intentionally is that everyone (including myself) is just going to assume the webserver is configured not just incorrectly, but incompetently: this would expose connection-strings, passwords, etc - and makes me less likely to want to get behind a project.

Now if the page were resembling a C program instead (e.g. using a `switch` and `case` labels as a nagiation menu) that'd be cool, but make things difficult for your readers who don't know C well-enough, and outright alienate people who are allergic to code but still work in this industry.

It's an old project. Probably just don't worry about it. :)

There was definitely a time when this kind of tongue in cheek joke was common, but even then things like hrefs would still work, this site used to render and PHP is definitely broken :)