> "Why does our website look like this? ... Our website embodies our cultural commitment to allocating resources where they solve the most important problems."
so looking at the source, the html is invalid (no title, for example), it eschews the lowly <p> tag for multiple <br> tags, the chemical structures are practically unmaintainable, monospace is not very readable for paragraphs of text, and it extensively misuses a deprecated element, <tt>, for the monospace font. seems less an example of ingenuity, and more hubris. these things could be fixed in less than an hour, but apparently that's wasted time (they do better with their blog, since that comes by default with wordpress).
with that said, the goal is ambitious and noble, but it harkens back to alchemists trying to make gold from lesser elements, something that seems tantalizingly achievable but is it really? i'll give them that there is a ton of free energy hitting the earth every day, and part of the overall progress of humanity will be better harnessing that energy going forward, instead of burning through the finite, previously-transformed solar energy that is buried oil & gas.
Wrong, the HTML is completely valid, in the sense that a browser renders it. All text is valid HTML; that's the whole point of lax parsing. It might not be valid XML, but if it works, why care?
that would be fine if they hadn't called attention to it, but they decided to take extraneous time to make it a point of identity, time they could have put into making the site minimally correct (and a little more accessible). whenever someone tells you of their goodness, rather than just letting their actions speak for themselves, it's reasonable to question their underlying motives.
so looking at the source, the html is invalid (no title, for example), it eschews the lowly <p> tag for multiple <br> tags, the chemical structures are practically unmaintainable, monospace is not very readable for paragraphs of text, and it extensively misuses a deprecated element, <tt>, for the monospace font. seems less an example of ingenuity, and more hubris. these things could be fixed in less than an hour, but apparently that's wasted time (they do better with their blog, since that comes by default with wordpress).
with that said, the goal is ambitious and noble, but it harkens back to alchemists trying to make gold from lesser elements, something that seems tantalizingly achievable but is it really? i'll give them that there is a ton of free energy hitting the earth every day, and part of the overall progress of humanity will be better harnessing that energy going forward, instead of burning through the finite, previously-transformed solar energy that is buried oil & gas.