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 […]

The Internet does not begin and end with the World Wide Web. Sometimes, if we want to truly understand how the web developed, we need to step back to a world where it never existed at all. The Internet invigorated us with a new kind of spirit; it created a new way of seeing, feeling […]

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.

On August 7, 2010 Wired declared that the World Wide Web was dead. The cover that graced the newstands that month featured a bold orange background splash with large black text words that simply read “The Web is Dead” (pictured above). The release was provocative and timely, just a few months before the 20th anniversary of the […]

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 […]

This is a small chunk of history of rock music on the web. It begins in Santa Cruz. Michael Goldberg left Rolling Stone magazine sometime in 1993. He did so because over 20 years of experience as an editor and writer in the music business was telling him that the digital world, and specifically the Internet, was […]

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 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 […]

The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actually follow this creative exchange all […]