Their reasoning was theological and extremist relative to the ideological alignments of the time. They believed that God alone was the source of all Glory and hence all Styling and that any lower orders of man-made automated inheritance could only obstruct and twist the Divine Radiance — and that any scripting, whether client or server-side, was against His Holy Word, which controlled functionality according to an unseen Internet of Metaphysical Things, the order of which was known only to the original Network Architects.
To advance past this level, the small close-knit community sagely observed, was to invite the unimaginable horrors which historically ensued after the time period in which they had been developed, and whose long shadows underneath they were all currently living.
So Kelliam was raised writing out HTML in cursive longhand by candle-light on an old-fashioned slate. It was actually just a piece of wood though that her father had painted with blackboard paint from Walmart many decades ago now. Walmarts across the globe now lay in ashes, of course — living on only in the family names of employfugees who had fled their feudal shelter during the First Days of Panic. Her fingers, after years of practice, knew to avoid the places by the edges of the board where the paint was chipping and her crisp chalk lines turned into ragged dust.
It was old school HTML too that she wrote, with <b> and <i> instead of <strong> and <em>. Her mother never let her use tables to control page layouts. Her father used to pontificate about the evils of rowspans and how they lead to the Final Disruption, but sometimes in the yard by the chicken coop, she used to furtively sketch out code for tables in ways that her parents assured her, had never been intended.
“Caaaawww — you shouldn’t.”
The chickens would tell her. Coming to scratch and peck away the evil brackets, the <tr>’s that even they too, dumb animals, knew couldn’t be trusted.
“Kelliam Best-Buy,” a stern maternal voice said from over her shoulder. “What are you doing out here?”
“Um, nothing mom,” she said spinning around on her heel. By now, the chickens had luckily destroyed any traces of her forbidden code.
“Then come with me in the house. I’ve been calling you. I need help rendering the fat.”
“Aw, but it stinks!”
“No buts, miss! Come along now.”
Kelliam dropped her stick in the yard and ran ahead of her mother up the stairs to the house, chickens calling behind her:
“We told you so…”
