are useful but dated documents with no guarantee that they are up to date.
They are kept because the rate of explosion of Web technology has meant that many newcomers are unaware of some of the original design rationale, and so important design criterai are in danger of being designed out by those who take for granted or overlook the requirements.
So some of this stuff is just as valid now as was then, and some of it for example has a slant from the original need to sell the idea of Global Hypertext, the World Wide Web, to the high enrgy physics (HEP) community which originally funded it.
At that time I didn't realize the importance of dating and signing and web documents, but as I wrote most of them, other contributions were normally signed.
The documents have a horizontal rule at the top after which the original document follows.
Tim Berners-Lee, 1996