The History of the Web

My ongoing research has me taking another look at the Browser Wars and thinking about how they’re retelling themselves in real-time today.

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.

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

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

Pseudo.com is a forgotten relic of the dot-com era. Was it ahead of its time? A moonshot that went too far? Or simply a piece of elaborate performance art?

A look at how we can save our websites from ourselves, and the stories that keep us going.

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?

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.

When websites disappear, how do we make sure that our history is preserved?

The web’s turn into commercial may have happened quickly—it was largely complete by the end of the 1990’s—but that doesn’t mean it didn’t take a turn into the weird here and there. Case and point: Zima.

This week I have something a bit different, written by longtime newsletter author Ernie Smith, best known for his history […]

A look at the work that standards makes possible, and the kinds of hypertext that were never fully realized