pne | Professional hosting, maybe... professional web design, no.

I was reading a computer magazine when I saw an advertisement [126KB JPG scan] for web hosting. The advertisement was in the form of source code.

I was about to write "HTML source code" but corrected myself because whatever that is, it's not HTML. This little bit should speak for itself:

...
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" link="#E20074" alink="#E20074" vlink="#E20074" text="#00000=">
<font face="arial, helvetica" size="2">

<p>
<font color="#E20074">
<h4>T-Online Homepages>
</font>
</p>
...

"h4" inside "p"? For that matter, "h4" inside "font"??

I was also about to boggle at "font" coming directly after "body", but apparently at least HTML 3.2 allows %text [text-level ("inline") elements] directly beneath "body"... but that spec also says that Every conforming HTML 3.2 document must start with the <!DOCTYPE> declaration that is needed to distinguish HTML 3.2 documents from other versions of HTML, and that doctype declaration is missing from the ad, so it doesn't qualify as HTML 3.2. (For that matter, apparently HTML 4 also requires a doctype declaration.)

But wait! HTML 2.0 also requires a doctype declaration:

To identify information as an HTML document conforming to this specification, each document must start with one of the following document type declarations.

HTML 2 also doesn't have a "font" tag.

So this isn't HTML of any description (though HTML 3.2 comes closest): simply ugly, repulsive tag soup. If it's any indication of the quality of their hosting, then yecch.