Primary Source

How to unlock Primary Source in Cheevos by using view-source: to inspect a webpage's raw HTML. Worth 15 XP.

The story

Partner. You looked underneath the page. You found the bones.

Every webpage you have ever visited is, underneath the fonts and the colors and the layout, just text. Structured, tagged, plain text. Most people never see it. They see the finished room, not the framing. You asked to see the framing.

Cache considers View Source close to sacred. Before there were tutorials, before there were courses, before there was a single video explaining how any of this worked, there was View Source. People built their first websites by looking at other people's websites, copying what worked, and slowly figuring out the rest. Cache learned everything he knows about the web this way, one viewed source at a time, back when the entire internet functioned as an open textbook nobody had to pay for.

He does not think this habit is old-fashioned. He thinks it is the most important one on this whole list. Curiosity that reaches under the surface of something instead of just consuming the surface. That is the instinct the Stash was built to reward.

Primary source, Partner. Into the bag.

The catalog entry

VIEW-SOURCE RECORD Acquired: Used view-source: to inspect a webpage's HTML. Condition: Unformatted. Raw. Rarity: RARE among non-developers. Cache's Notes: View Source is how the web taught itself to the world. Before tutorials, before courses, before YouTube, people just looked at pages and read how they were made. Cache learned everything he knows this way. Primary source. This is the most important habit on the list.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

Looking under the hood of any page takes seconds.

  1. Navigate to any webpage in Firefox.
  2. Click into the address bar and type view-source: immediately before the page's URL (for example, view-source:https://example.com), then press Enter. You can also right-click most pages and choose "View Page Source."
  3. Scroll through the raw HTML that loads.

view-source: renders the exact HTML document the server sent your browser, unrendered and syntax-highlighted, rather than the visual page your browser normally paints from it. It shows the tags, attributes, inline scripts, and comments exactly as they arrived over the network, before CSS and JavaScript reshape anything into the page you actually see. This is distinct from browser DevTools' Inspector panel, which shows the live, JavaScript-modified DOM rather than the original source, making view-source: the more accurate tool for seeing precisely what a server delivered.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache keeps a whole wing for habits like this one: the small, curious acts that used to be how everyone learned the web. To meet the raccoon who still reads source code for fun, read the story.