By Susam Pal on 30 Jan 2022

In a recent online discussion about simple static websites, Chris
Chapman posted
this quite clever comment:

Firm supporter of Web Pi (3.14159). When it comes to building for
the web today, I’m always amazed that “so much can be done with so
little” and yet the default is the opposite – “so much is needed to
deliver so little” – so irrational! Where did we go wrong? I wonder
what Web Euler (2.71828) would have looked like?

I enjoyed the amusing play on the terms “Web 2.0” and “Web 3.0” as
well as the irony-infused pun involving the word “irrational”. I
piled on to the witty wordplay with my own comment where I remarked
how my favourite phase of the web was Web Golden
(1.61803). I will elaborate here what that
phase of the web looked like and why I was fond of it.

Fascinating Realization

I believe I was fortunate enough to grow up during a time when the
web was a very diverse place full of various eccentric digital
gardens. I was introduced to the world wide web around 1999. Access
to the Internet was very limited where I lived. My friends and I
would visit so-called Internet cafés and pay the equivalent
of a whole American dollar for an hour of Internet usage.

I was already quite familiar with computers then but the Internet
and the world wide web was completely new to me. Until then, thanks
to my prior exposure to the Logo
programming language, I had only considered computers to be a device
for problem solving and recrea