What is the Web? - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
“Be linkable and accessible to any client” is a provocative test for whether something is “of the web”.
Link tags: worldwide
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Who is web3 for? • Robin Rendle
Thoughts from Robin, prompted by the Web History podcast I’m narrating and the other Robin’s notes on web3 that I linked to:
Who is the web for? Everyone, everywhere, and not only the few with a financial stake in it. It’s still this enormously beautiful thing that has so much potential.
But web3? That’s just not it, man.
Exactly! The blinkered web3 viewpoint is a classic example of this fallacious logic (also, as Robin points out, exemplified by AMP):
- Something must be done!
- This (terrible idea) is something.
- Something has been done.
1990: Programming the World Wide Web – Web Development History
Ah, this brings back memories of hacking on the WorldWideWeb project at CERN!
(Not the original one. I’m not that old. I mean the recreation.)
Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25
Brewster Kahle:
The World Wide Web at its best is a mechanism for people to share what they know, almost always for free, and to find one’s community no matter where you are in the world.
Yax.com · Blog · Out of the Matrix: Early Days of the Web (1991)
Thirty years later, it is easy to overlook the web’s origins as a tool for sharing knowledge. Key to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision were open standards that reflected his belief in the Rule of Least Power, a principle that choosing the simplest and least powerful language for a given purpose allows you to do more with the data stored in that language (thus, HTML is easier for humans or machines to interpret and analyze than PostScript). Along with open standards and the Rule of Least Power, Tim Berners-Lee wanted to make it easy for anyone to publish information in the form of web pages. His first web browser, named Nexus, was both a browser and editor.
Jeremy Keith ‘We’ve ruined the Web. Here’s how we fix it.’ - This is HCD
Did you hear the one about two Irishmen on a podcast?
I really enjoyed this back-and-forth discussion with Gerry on performance, waste, and more. We agreed on much, but we also clashed sometimes.
Networked information services: The world-wide web [PDF]
A 1992 paper by Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and Jean-Françoise Groff.
The W3 project is not a research project, but a practical plan to implement a global information system.
The History of the URL
This is a wonderful deep dive into all the parts of a URL:
scheme:[//[user:password@]host[:port]][/]path[?query][#fragment]
There’s a lot of great DNS stuff about the host part:
Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularily given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.
Running Code Over Time – Eric’s Archived Thoughts
We should think of our code, even our designs, as running for decades, and alter our work to match.
Information mesh
Timelines of people, interfaces, technologies and more:
30 years of facts about the World Wide Web.
Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo
Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!
CERN Hack days – Chiteri’s Blog
Martin gives a personal history of his time at the two CERN hack projects …and also provides a short history of the universe.
WWW:BTB — History (Overview)
This history of the World Wide Web from 1996 is interesting for the way it culminates with …Java. At that time, the language seemed like it would become the programmatic lingua franca for the web. Brendan Eich sure upset that apple cart.
First Web browser revived during hackathon - YouTube
This is the lovely little film about our WorldWideWeb hack project. It was shown yesterday at CERN during the Web@30 celebrations. That was quite a special moment.
WorldWideWeb coverage
Remy’s keeping a list of hyperlinks to stories covering our recent hack week at CERN.
nexus-project / nexus-browser · GitLab
Here’s the source code for the WorldWideWeb project we did at CERN.
WWW: Where’s the Writable Web?
Prompted by our time at CERN, Remy ponders why web browsers (quite quickly) diverged from the original vision of being read/write software.
WorldWideWeb, 30 years on – Dan Q
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.
FOREVERYONE.NET
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‽
Recreating the First Web Browser at CERN | U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Geneva
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.”