Steele’s pioneering work — in Hypercard, then CDROMs, then Flash — helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an urbanist feel that owed a debt to Toronto’s most beloved adopted urbanist, Jane Jacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable.
Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web’s critical “view source” affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful; this affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against enshittification.