The web's first browser featured full color, read/write capabilities, and multiple windows. The second browser was a text-only command line tool. Guess which one people actually used?

Before the web, Gopher offered a way to connect to the Internet and share documents. And if things had gone a little differently, it might even be what we use to surf information today.

Ever wondered how people found about the web. The first transmission of its existence was a digital one, a Usenet post that sparked a following of early web pioneers.

Without hypertext, there would be no World Wide Web. But its name and conception predate the web's creation by decades.

Tim Berners-Lee has said, on multiple occasions, the the first website in the US was one of the major reasons the web took off. But what did it do and why was it so important?

There’s this scene in the second season of The Crown (if you watch enough old movies, you’ll see the same kind of thing). The scene depicts Princess Margaret, away from England and distraught after hearing news of a former love, as she attempts to get in contact with her sister, the Queen of England. She tells […]

Why is it the <img> tag instead of the <image> tag? The answer, it turns out, dates back to one of the web's earliest browsers and one of the web's earliest discussions.

Believe it or not, there was a time before search engines. Discovery on the web was far more difficult. It was easy to get lost. That is, until a few different people created a map.

I talked a bit about the importance of the WWW Wizards Workshop last time in my recap on the importance of 1995, but there was another essential element of that meeting I glossed over a bit. In July of 1993, a few dozen developers huddled together at the O’Reilly offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They had […]

When Paul Phillips the web is at its best when its being useless he did the only thing he could think of. He built his own useless site to catalog it.

You can link to anything on the web. That's a strength. And yet the right to link has been dragged into court on a regular basis for decades. Why is that?

Before browsers were truly cross-platform, there was a time when each operating system had their browser of choice, and it was tailored to the needs of those users.

In 1995, it would be hard to believe that you could win a million dollars from surfing the web. Then, AOL made it possible.

The word homepage came into popular use in the mid to late 90's, but it's origin dates back to the web's beginning.

There are the browsers that everyone's heard of. And then there are some that, for whatever reason, faded away. These are the latter.

Thanks to the web, in 1999 (or thereabouts), you might find yourself at home, staring at the virtual window of your computer screen, looking out the very real windows of your favorite cyber café.

The web distributes access, access to information, and access to one another. Access on the web is what brings us to small island off the coast of Fiji, where web pioneers forged a unique community.

Here’s a message from the creator of the first-ever pop-up ad: It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco, so let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble. It was my intention to take a look at the history of ads to see how we ended up in […]

A history of Perl, Python, and the websites that rely on them.

Geocities is likely a site you've heard of. It may even have been a site that you used. It's origin, and the movement it later inspired, is an incredible story of self-expression and serendipity.

There are plenty who make the case that the web makes us lonely. But sometimes, the opposite is true.

It might seem strange to talk about books on the web, but when designers first turned to books for a way to learn about the web, Lynda Weinman and Jennifer Robbins showed them the way.

In the first few years of the web's spread to ubiquity, traditional news publishers moved online. But a new kind of publisher was also born, one that was native to the web, with a whole new set of rules.

In the late 1980’s, Aliza Sherman moved to New York City and took a job in the music business, helping to manage bands like Def Leppard and Metallica. In 1992, she changed gears and began working with the Internet. The web still existed mostly within the hallways of CERN, but Sherman found her place on […]

You may have heard the name Jeffrey Zeldman before. He’s often referred to as the godfather of the web, and in the early 2000’s he was a major force behind the Web Standards Project. But Zeldman started his career in advertising, and wound up at Grey Entertainment in the mid-90s. It was Alec Pollak who […]

If you work on the web, you know that with software, things don’t always go right the first time. The web is this massive, global community tinkering with loosely connected technologies to piece together websites that, with any luck, work well together. These tools and technologies are always in flux and there have been plenty […]

Communities on the web often formed around common interests and niches. As they grew, their utility began to shift to more mainstream elements

There’s this story about Ebay and Pez that used to go around. It goes something like this: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay, was looking for something to do after moving to San Jose from Boston and selling his first startup, an ecommerce pen computing platform named eShop, to Microsoft. At the time, Omidyar’s fiancee […]

In 1995, Netscape Navigator was enjoying a meteoric rise to the top of the browser market. They had only released the first version of their browser a year prior, but already it was a crowd favorite and was bolstering the growing popularity of the web. But employees at Netscape were constantly looking over their shoulder, knowing full […]

A web magazine springs up from the depths of Hotwired, and captures the imagination and attention of a growing web audience.

Internet Radio has been attempted so many times in the history of the web that it's hard to keep track. With each time came a new innovation, and in most cases, a new way to fail.

You might be surprised by what options you have. Already, in the late-90's, travel was abuzz on the web. And the competition was fierce.

February 1, 1996 was an absolutely terrible day for Shabbir J. Safdar. Safdar believed deeply in the open web, so much so that he started the non-profit organization Voter Telecommunications Watch (VTW) so that he could help protect it. That day, the first of February, the United States Congress decided to dismantle a part of […]

Archiving the web is an important mission and the resources it requires is immense. It is thanks to a select few that it gets done at all.

Quite frankly, my feeling is that the primary reason why the web is not accessible or not wholly accessible to people with disabilities today is because individuals with disabilities are not considered as part of the core population when we created the web and web sites and even in its initial design. -Mike Paciello The […]

In an interview for her book Internet Art in 2004, writer Rachel Greene had this to say about why she felt the subject of her book was so important: I refuse to let commercial interests dominate the history and perception of the net because I think they would exclude the most important and dynamic internal content […]

Web designers that cut their teeth in the late 90’s and early 2000’s probably remember table-based layouts. This was a time when some webmasters forced their sites into perfect configuration using HTML data tables, spacer GIF images and a few kindred hacks. But for a while there, there weren’t a whole lot of options in […]

Let’s go back to 1996, in Boston, at the annual Macworld Expo. Not a great year for Apple mind you. It wouldn’t be until a year later that Steve Jobs would make his return, and sales were at an all time low. But it was an excellent time for the web. In June of 1995 […]

1996 was the year of the city guide. By 1998, they were already gone.

Content Management Systems — software that helps people author and publish websites — likely dates back farther than you think. The problem is, it wasn't quite called that yet.

When you think of HTML and CSS, you probably imagine them as a package deal. But for years after Tim Berners-Lee first created the World Wide Web in 1989, there was no such thing as CSS. The original plan for the web offered no way to style a website at all. There’s a now-infamous post […]

It’s easy to forget that HTML, which is an extremely simple programming language, is actually just an exceedingly complex markup language. HTML was one of the original building blocks of the web, and its used by web developers to mark-up (or describe) a page with agreed-upon HTML tags that, when rendered by a browser, spits out a website. The agreed-upon part […]

The Webby Awards was founded way back when no one knew if the web would take off. When we take a look at the Webbys, we see the web's history.

The design community in particular has been a rather dynamic part of the fabric of the web from its earliest days. Designing for the web means understanding the constraints of the screen while simultaneously accounting for a whole host of variables, like hover states and animation and screen resolutions and network connections. It requires a […]

When the Allaire brothers were looking for a way to build websites, nothing stuck out. So they built their own and called it Coldfusion.

Let’s talk about about the “Browser Wars.” They kicked off in the mid-90s, at a time when the world was just starting to come online. The web was still a fuzzy, undefined medium. Those who did decide to visit the web for the first time found themselves standing at the precipice of a technological arms race between two behemoth […]

When Kevin Lynch started going around and talking to web designers, he wrote everything down. He was interested in the hurdles that designers and developers had to overcome, but he was particularly drawn to what they envisioned as the perfect web editing tool. What features, specifically, were they looking for? After a few months of collecting data, […]

When two sisters hit the web with their new idea, it was unlike anything anyone had seen. That one site, ChickClick, inspired so many more and crafted a foundational network of the early web.

I’ve been digging into the history of search engines and centralized platforms lately. Mostly my goal has been to uncover what happened on the web to make privacy a commodity that is less than sacred, and intensive advertising the dominant business model. It’s easy to think that our current modus operandi (tracking scripts that follow […]

People thought a magazine about the web would never work. People thought a magazine about the web on the web would never work. They both did.

This article was originally published in CSS-Tricks. In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a bittersweet message for a community that he had helped lead: Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal […]

In the beginning, the web had no memory. When you followed a link to a new page, everything you did on the last page was erased. There was a fresh start with every click. It was Netscape that gave the web a memory. Pretty early on, actually, when they realized there were a few issues […]

The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck.

In January of 1999, members of DoCoMo held a press conference in Tokyo, attended by only a handful of people. At the event, they released a teaser video for the launch of a new service. The teaser was vivid. Blobs of all colors streamed across the screen to an electronica soundtrack. This was overlaid with innocuous terms […]

Way before social media, listservs acted as a glue that held the web community together.

How would you structure a feed for syndicating blog content? Remember, it would need to be standard enough for a computer to read and parse it, but simple enough for a developer to implement. Specific enough for web publishers, blogs, podcasts and all sorts of media, but universal enough for edge cases. Not to mention well […]

In 1999, the word "community" took on a new meaning on the web. One that would have a lasting impact for years to come.

Neopets was a massively successful and inclusive digital world, but I think people focus far too much on its advertising model. There’s so much more to the site. The site spawned its own unique economic simulacrum, had a tenuous connection to Scientology, a constantly shifting design, and a dedicated and ambitious fanbase that built it […]

The politics of campaigns have been massively influenced by the tonal shift of the web, and they will likely never be the same.

It’s been over seventeen years since the world ended. Or, rather, it was supposed to be The End of the World as We Know It. If that sounds like a big deal that’s because, at the time, it truly was. This is how things were supposed to go down. On January 1, 2000 at the […]

Computer programmers like to squabble. I suppose this is true in any profession, but it is most certainly true for programmers. Don’t believe me? Just ask a programmer if you should set up your web services using SOAP or REST. Then grab a cup of coffee, because it’s going to be a while. It would […]

Wikipedia is a free, online, user-edited and user-contributed encyclopedia. It is also a stupendously simple and almost inevitable idea, but has proven to be nothing short of revolutionary. Certainly, much has been made of Wikipedia over the years. It has served as a case study for the reliability of truth within crowd-sourced material, the strength […]

The web has always belonged to all of us. That is to say its protocols and underlying technology are products of the public domain and can be used by everyone, everywhere. By design, and with prescribed purpose, the web is open. Some of the first voyagers on the web’s shifting shores believed almost unblinkingly in […]

A decade before modern day web components, Microsoft had already hit on a formula for their success.

Benjamin Sun and Omar Wasow met for the first time in 1999. They had both recently struck out on the web as passionate early adopters. Wasow had just recently made a shift from running a pre-web Internet provider called New York Online to developing and designing websites for magazines like Vibe and Essence. Sun, on […]

By 2001, the world blog had entered Internet vernacular, both as a noun and a verb. Mena Trott was one of these bloggers. Her site, A Dollar Short, went up in April of 2001. With the launch of her site, Trott aimed big. She loved blogging, and she aspired to be one of the best. So she set […]

Archiving the web is an important mission and the resources it requires is immense. It is thanks to a select few that it gets done at all.

The history of JSON is the history of the people that created it, and what they set out to do with the software they wrote.

Accessibility is one of the foundational principles of the World Wide Web. Fighting to preserve that principle are the creators behind the most powerful tools, some of which still exist today.

It was January of 2003, and 19 year old blogger and amateur programmer Matt Mullenweg was distraught. In a post on his blog titled The Blogging Software Dilemma, Mullenweg wrote: My logging software hasn’t been updated for months, and the main developer has disappeared, and I can only hope that he’s okay. Mullenweg’s “logging software” was […]

The web’s history is filled to the brim with stops and starts and wrong turns. It is a technology that was, after all, designed and built by a shifting and growing community. And every once in a while, that community needs a spark to inspire change. I’d like to point out two such moments, which […]

I’d really recommend reading a thread on Eric Meyer’s blog from early 2007. In it, he poses a pretty simple question for his regular readers: What do you consider to be some of the most important events in the history of CSS and web design? There are a lot of different answers, and more then a few […]

I could have titled this “A Tale of Two Acquisitions,” but I already used that one. Still, we’re going to take a look at two hugely successful platforms that rapidly rose to the top of their game, only to come crashing back down after their acquisition. An acquisition, I might add, by the same company. […]

One of the web's most influential browsers has roots that date back to its earliest days, and an evolution that has transformed it several times over.

It was 2004, and Ian Hickson had just got out of a W3C workshop organized by Adobe. The topic was how to use web standards to address the growing needs of web applications and developers. Hickson pushed hard to simply extend HTML, the existing markup language of the web, rather than invent something entirely new. Others […]

The term AJAX may have not been coined until 2005, but it's origin stretches all the way back to the early 2000's, when browsers provided developers with the glue between clients and servers.

From a browser engine that started as the lesser known option used in an obscure browser to one that would take hold over the entire browser market.

Jessica Livingston has a passion for the web’s future. It’s what lead her, in March of 2005, to quit her day job and help start up a new kind of investment firm called Y Combinator. Livingston had been a director at another VC firm, but she wanted to do things a bit differently with Y […]

If you don’t know much about the Opera browser, that’s probably because their market share in the United States has never been particularly high (right now, it stands at around 1.5%). Opera’s competitive advantage is that they deal with the real world. They solve problems that other browsers don’t, and they do it globally and […]

A lot can be done with each pixel on a website, but only a few people have tried creating websites one pixel at a time.

From Yahooligans! to Club Penguin, the kinds of sites we made for kids on the early web were a bit unsteady, but formative and fun for the first web generation.

It started with a simple manifesto. A manifesto posted online with 37 guiding principles, small phrases showcasing big ideas like “We See People” and “Not Full Service” and “We Don’t Throw Curves.” The website was a list of rules for a web design agency to follow, created by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim […]

If you're a developer today, you likely take advantage of built in tools for web debugging every day. They came from the smallest places, and it took years to get them where they are today.

The mid-2000's were often referred to as the era of Web 2.0. That may have been an overused term, but it undeniably changed the way designers and developers approached their practice through patterns.

The comedy web series was one of the more interesting and influential adaptions of the web medium. It reversed the principles of traditional entertainment to create videos that were more approachable.

This post was originally published on CSS-Tricks. On March 6, 2018, a new bug was added to the official Mozilla Firefox browser bug tracker. A developer had noticed an issue with Mozilla’s nightly build. The report noted that a 14-day weather forecast widget typically featured on a German website had all of a sudden broken and disappeared. […]

How many websites are there? That’s not an easy question to answer. The web is, by its very nature, decentralized and global and super difficult to properly account for. A feature that we’re more and more finding is both a blessing and a curse. Best estimate for that number right now (at the time of […]

News used to be behind a paywall, or not. But then a publication figured out how to do both.

Ushahidi is a platform that uses the democratizing power of the web to open access to citizen journalists on the ground and shine a light where the truth is hidden.

Over the years, the web has assumed a few forms. That of a technological catalyst, a representation of the the times, a community ground. But it also can be very weird, and quite silly. That’s probably how we got single serving sites. Single serving sites follow a pattern that’s probably familiar to you. The site […]

The web, as a visual and interactive medium, is still pretty new. Designing for the web has always meant striking a balance between influence from other mediums like print and brand new attitudes. The most revolutionary techniques in web design managed to find that balance, and pushed the web forward in leaps and bounds. Little […]

When the iPhone was released, two apps rushed to market in a battle over geolocation that would come to be briefly known as the "location wars"

In 2008, the team at Microsoft found themselves in quite the pickle. Let me back up. In 2002, the team at Mozilla found themselves in quite the pickle. Mozilla was the team inside of Netscape that had been spun out as a non-profit to work on Netscape’s browser. Netscape was, in turn, acquired by AOL […]

The World Wide Web Foundation began as a way to bring the web to everyone. In these trying times, it is needed more than ever.

The web has a long and storied history with text, typography and fonts. Most content on the web is text. And at the very least, typography accounts for 95% of web design. But this is the story of fonts, that fundamental building block of design. In 2009, the WOFF font format was developed, and subsequently sent to […]

The web is filled with rundowns of this JavaScript framework versus that one. But we don't often take the time to understand why they were built in the first place.

My dream of starting BlackGirlsCode… was born out of this frustration that “blacks in tech” are often the unmitigated invisible men (and women) in the room. – Kimberly Bryant Kimberly Bryant graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Electrical Engineering. While still in college, she noticed something. Among students from her graduating class with […]

The story of how responsive images made its way into the browser doubles as an inside look at the standards making process itself. For some of us on the web, myself counted among them, it was our very first look behind the curtain. Web standards, the rules of CSS and HTML and Javascript that govern […]

Offline browsing has been a kind of holy grail of web development. In the mid-90's, it was a source of excitement, speculation, and soaring valuations.

You are reading this somewhere. On your laptop or on your phone or in your email or RSS reader. If you’re reading this on the web, then this page was delivered from my server to you via a protocol called HTTP. There’s all sorts of fascinating things I can say about HTTP, but the important […]

Flash is a definitive part of the web’s history. And like many technologies that get caught in the web’s web, it has a rather storied history of its own. But from basically the beginning, it’s development has run parallel to the web’s. Flash got started, conceptually, the day that Jonathan Gay met Charlie Jackson at […]