This is a lovely write-up of the WorldWideWeb hack week at CERN:
The Web is a success story in open standards, natural and by-design progressive enhancement, and the future-proof archivability of human-readable code.
I linked to this a while back but now this great half hour documentary by Jessica Yu is ready and you can watch the whole thing online: Tim Berners-Lee, the birth of the web, and where the web has gone since.
In the scenes describing the early web, there’s footage of the recreated Line Mode Browser—how cool is that‽
The US Mission to the UN in Geneva came by to visit us during our hackweek at CERN.
“Our hope is that over the next few days we are going to recreate the experience of what it would be like using that browser, but doing it in a way that anyone using a modern web browser can experience,” explains team member Jeremy Keith. The aim is to “give people the feeling of what it would have been like, in terms of how it looked, how it felt, the fonts, the rendering, the windows, how you navigated from link to link.”
Here’s the CERN write-up of our week of hacking to produce the recreation of the WorldWideWeb browser.
Photos from earlier this week:
In a small room in CERN’s Data Center, an international group of nine developers is taking a plunge back in time to the beginnings of the World Wide Web. Their aim is to enable the whole world to experience what the web looked like viewed within the very first browser developed by Tim Berners-Lee.
A little teaser from U.S. MIssion at the U.N. in Geneva:
This year marks the 30th Anniversary of the birth of the #WorldWideWeb. A team of #webdevelopers are working to make it possible for the public to experience the #FirstWebBrowser as it looked on #TimBernersLees’s computer @CERN…
On the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, Tim Berners-Lee delivered this address in 1995.
To a large part we have MEMEXes on our desks today. We have not yet seen the wide scale deployment of easy human interfaces for editing hypertext and making links. (I find this constantly frustrating, but always assume will be cured by cheap commercial products within the year.)
Tales of over-engineering, as experienced by Bridget. This resonates with me, and I think she’s right when she says that these things go in cycles. The pendulum always ends up swinging the other way eventually.
This seems to work quite nicely: convert your progressive web app into an APK file that you can then submit to the Google Play store (you’ll still have to go through all the hassle of submitting the app, but still).
I tested this with The Session and sure enough, it looks like it’s available to download from Google Play.
As the commercial viability of the web grew, we saw more and more users become consumers and not creators. Many consumers see websites as black boxes full of magic that they could never understand. Because of this, they would never think to try to create something.
This is a shame. We lost a little piece of the magic of the web when this culture came about.
A call to action to create a fan site about something you love. It would be an unmonetisable enthusiasm. But it’s still worth doing:
- The act of creation itself is fun!
- Sharing something you love with the world is worthwhile.
- You’ll learn something.
So here’s the challenge:
- Create a Fan Site.
- Help someone create a Fan Site.
- Create a webring.
Twenty years ago—when the web was just a decade old—Tim Berners-Lee gave this talk, looking backwards and forwards.
For me the fundamental Web is the Web of people. It’s not the Web of machines talking to each other; it’s not the network of machines talking to each other. It’s not the Web of documents. Remember when machines talked to each other over some protocol, two machines are talking on behalf of two people.
Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:
Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.
Now this is a feature request I can get behind!
A user must provide permission to enable geolocation, or notifications, or camera access, so why not also require permission for megabytes of JavaScript that will block the main thread?
Without limits, there is no incentive for a JavaScript developer to keep their codebase small and dependencies minimal. It’s easy to add another framework, and that framework adds another framework, and the next thing you know you’re loading tens of megabytes of data just to display a couple hundred kilobytes of content.
I’m serious about this. It’s is an excellent proposal for WebKit, similar to the never-slow mode proposed by Alex for Chromium.
This!
When we talk about HTML and CSS these discussions impact the entry point into this profession. Whether front or backend, many of us without a computer science background are here because of the ease of starting to write HTML and CSS. The magic of seeing our code do stuff on a real live webpage! We have already lost many of the entry points that we had. We don’t have the forums of parents teaching each other HTML and CSS, in order to make a family album. Those people now use Facebook, or perhaps run a blog on wordpress.com or SquareSpace with a standard template. We don’t have people customising their MySpace profile, or learning HTML via Neopets. We don’t have the people, usually women, entering the industry because they needed to learn HTML during that period when an organisation’s website was deemed part of the duties of the administrator.
I agree with every single word Rachel has written.
I care not a whit what tools or frameworks, or languages you use to build something on the web. But I really care deeply when particular tools, frameworks, or languages become mandatory for even getting a foot in the door.
This is for everyone.
I might be the “old guard” but if you think I’m incapable of learning React, or another framework, and am defending my way of working because of this, please get over yourself. However, 22 year old me would have looked at those things and run away. If we make it so that you have to understand programming to even start, then we take something open and enabling, and place it back in the hands of those who are already privileged. I have plenty of fight left in me to stand up against that.
During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.
The internet of 2019 is vital societal infrastructure. We depend on it to keep in touch with family, to pay for things, and so much more.
Just because it got serious doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and weird.
Side by side screenshots of websites, taken ten years apart. The whitespace situation has definitely improved. It would be interesting to compare what the overall page weights were/are though.
The context here is JavaScript, not apples or olives.
This is yet another great explainer from Ire. Tree shaking is one of those things that I thought I understood, but always had the nagging doubt that I was missing something. This article really helped clear things up for me.
Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.
A small but perfectly formed progressive web app. It’s a private, offline-first personal journal with no log-in and no server-stored data. You can read about the tech stack behind it:
Your notes are only stored on your device — they’re never sent to a server. You don’t even need to sign-in to use it! It works offline, so you can reflect upon your day on the slow train journey home.
Dave on the opaqueness of toolchains:
As toolchains grow and become more complex, unless you are expertly familiar with them, it’s very unclear what transformations are happening in our code. Tracking the differences between the input and output and the processes that code underwent can be overwhelming. When there’s a problem, it’s increasingly difficult to hop into the assembly line and diagnose the issue.
There’s a connection here to one of the biggest issues with what’s currently being labelled “AI”:
In the same way AI needs some design to show its work in how it came to its final answer, I feel that our automated build tools could use some help as well.
I really like this suggestion for making the invisble visible:
I sometimes wonder if Webpack or Gulp or [Insert Your Build Tool Here] could benefit from a Scratch-like interface for buildchains.