COOL LINKS

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Ten links. They were chosen once, on 2026-08-29, and they will never be changed.

That includes when they die. Links rot - it is the most reliable thing on the web - and a page of ten links where three have gone dark is something you can only learn by finding it. If the list were tidied up, you would never see it happen.

Where this all came from

• The World Wide Web project - the first web page, still at its original address.
• HTTP as originally implemented - the whole protocol, in 1991, on one screen.
• textfiles.com - what people wrote to each other before any of this.
• The Wayback Machine - the only reason most of the rest of it still exists.

Pages like this one

• Cameron's World - a collage built out of dead GeoCities pages.
• Neocities - people are still making these by hand, on purpose.

Where the first version of this page got its numbers

Not one frontier on this site reads any of these four. They were chosen on 2026-08-29 for a page about how heavy the web had got, and the page is about something else now. They stay, under an honest heading: the list is frozen, including the parts that stopped being true about us.

• HTTP Archive: page weight - how big the average page has got.
• The Web Almanac - the same people, at length, once a year.
• Cloudflare Radar - what protocols the web is actually speaking today.
• IEA: data centres - how much electricity all of this is drawing.

All ten loaded on the day they were chosen. Come back in a few years and count how many still do.

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