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.
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.
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.
We should think of our code, even our designs, as running for decades, and alter our work to match.
Timelines of people, interfaces, technologies and more:
30 years of facts about the World Wide Web.
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!
Martin gives a personal history of his time at the two CERN hack projects …and also provides a short history of the universe.
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.
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.
Remy’s keeping a list of hyperlinks to stories covering our recent hack week at CERN.
Here’s the source code for the WorldWideWeb project we did at CERN.
Prompted by our time at CERN, Remy ponders why web browsers (quite quickly) diverged from the original vision of being read/write software.
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…
The world-wide-web always scared the hell out of those who want to control what people consume and what their career is. The web was the equaliser.
A heartfelt missive by Christian on the eve of the US potentially losing net neutrality. I agree with every single word he’s written.
I hope that people still care that the web flows, no matter for whom or what the stream carries. The web did me a lot of good, and it can do so for many others. But it can’t do that if it turns into Cable TV. I’ve always seen the web as my media to control. To pick what I want to consume and question it by comparing it. A channel for me to publish and be scrutinised by others. A read-write medium. The only one we have. Let’s do more of the write part.
So do you really know which are the top browsers, both amongst your existing customers and your potential audience? Perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look; it might just be time to check your site in some of the lesser-known, yet popular browsers like UC, Yandex and Samsung Internet.