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There are reasons why certain practices fell out of use. Here is an example: the html tag "marquee" makes text bounce back and forth in a box. It is wildly impractical. But the tag itself is now incompatible with many coding languages. Some browsers, a few of which were invented well after the tag’s heyday, no longer exhibit text that was tagged with the "marquee" feature.

In short, the architecture of the internet is increasingly unforgiving to the old web, and search engines and browsers have no interest in preserving what does not comply. What is the purpose of what Lialina calls “the Vernacular Web?” How can we plan for digital conservancy, and how should this affect how we approach personal relationships with the web?

Olia Lialina used to call herself a net artist. When people called her a web artist she would be offended because web artists just make pages and write blogs. Years later she finds that embarassing, as that is the valiant work that made the web a place she liked to make art in. These days she is an archivist of the old wesb, which she saw as more public and more handmade.

What she misunderstood back then was what it means to present a collection to an online audience, and the consequences of that no longer being the role that individuals play online. She says, in “The many-to-many principle really worked. Making your own site and building collections was a parallel process for a lot of people. The early web was more about spirit than skills. To distribute was no less important than to create.”

What does it mean to distribute? What does it mean to preserve?

Vernacular Web and The Obsolete