It's a definite throwback.

The Victorian Web is a trip down memory lane in more than one way. It pre-dates the rise of the then-capitalized World Wide Web. As standalone products, both Intermedia and Storyspace offered far richer capabilities than the then-fledgling web, but the maintainers of the Victorian Web gamely tried to port it over anyway.

It’s a spacer gif and some inline styling away from a full-blown example of the web before web standards. And yet for all its limitations, it's more hypertext than much of what passes for the web today.

make-public