One way to look at this code is as a quick prototype to get the idea into real thing to play with. And to appreciate that, one have to realize that the original idea included both reading and editing of web pages easily in the same client in WYSIWYG fashion.

See https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html for context:

I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)

From just skimming, it’s some nice, clean Objective-C. Always pleasant to read!