Some of it is probably generational. Kernighan will be 80 this year. Ritchie, gone now 10 years, was a little older. Wall and Stallman are a generation younger

Some of it is probably generational. Kernighan will be 80 this year. Ritchie, gone now 10 years, was a little older. Wall and Stallman are a generation younger -- true Boomers, if you will, born in the 50s. The computing topics tackled by those generations were foundational, but they also predate the web as a Thing. So they're ON the web, to one degree or another, but it's not their focus. By the time you get to the next gen of folks -- and let's just use GenX as the label; I mean folks born in the early 60s through about 1980 -- the people making contributions have the web as a MAJOR component of the computing landscape. These folks are "web native," and so it makes sense that they'd have fancier web pages/sites because the tools and technologies for doing such things are part of their remit, or at least close to it. Twiddling with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript was a big deal for a long time, and it showed in the pages of folks like (say) Eric Meyer. I'm 51, born in 1970. I don't think I ever saw a web presence for anyone more than about 5 years older than I am that was elaborate, or the sadly-now-withdrawn-from-public-life Mark Pilgrim.