I think it's part of a tradition that began with the earliest browsers including a "View Source" feature. I have not been able to use WorldWideWeb yet, but I kn

I think it's part of a tradition that began with the earliest browsers including a "View Source" feature. I have not been able to use WorldWideWeb yet, but I know that Mosaic did. It's been a huge part of what made the Web successful, because you could always see the source and copy it. For today's pages, View Source is probably not enough for figuring out what's going on inside a page, you need the whole Dev Tools kitchen sink. So to answer your question: tradition. Sadly, newer platforms (iOS, Android) have largely done away with this. I know that in Chrome you can manually prepend view-source: to the URL, but that is neither accessible, nor discoverable.