1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web
Published: April 8, 2025
The world changed a lot in 1995. And for the web, it was a transformational year.
Our Online Homes Need Infastructure
Published: March 25, 2025
A home online is about as essential as it gets. But we need to make that easier. Where are we heading to build this new web together?
Expanding Access: The History of Ecommerce Part 1
Published: March 4, 2025
The earliest work with selling things online was all about reaching a shopping public ready to log on and start. But along the way, they found a whole new audience for shopping, which changed the way we think about commerce on the web..
What happens to what we’ve already created?
Published: February 11, 2025
When we think about AI, we can’t only think of what it has generated. We need to think about what it does to what the world has already created.
Would the internet exist today if the printing press didn’t come before it?
Published: January 28, 2025
The breakthroughs of the web are often compared to the printing press. But could the former exist without the latter?
Progressive enhancement brings everyone in
Published: January 7, 2025
Early computers faced unexpected failures, and that gave us graceful degradation. But on the web, we needed something different. We needed progressive enhancement.
Where did mainstream media come from?
Published: December 10, 2024
The term mainstream media is so common these days, we can forget where it came from. But it has an interesting connection with the web.
The Free Web
Published: November 26, 2024
There is something you can do to help the open web. Put yourself on it.
The Website that Predicted AI
Published: November 13, 2024
There’s a website developed with a personalized experience in mind. It touts major breakthroughs in predictive technology, driven by sophisticated algorithms that provide real-time recommendations. And it was launched in 1995.
It’s Lists All the Way Down
Published: September 25, 2024
When you get down to it, a lot of the web is just lists. And that’s kind of what it was meant for.
The Gift of Code
Published: September 4, 2024
In the open source community, there is perhaps no greater gift than code. This is about that time 135,000 lines of gifted code created a new era of JavaScript
November 7, 2006. Adobe gifts 135,000 lines of code to Mozilla in the form of Project Tamarin, a Javascript Virtual Machine compliant with the still-not-fully-implemented ECMAScript 4. Mozilla would try a few times to incorporate Tamarin into Firefox, but would eventually abandon that idea for performance reasons.
Still, it injected some enthusiasm into adopting more modern Javascript standards, pushing the web forward at a time when it really needed that.