September 2019 Weblog: Communities and Where They Sometimes Go Wrong

September 26, 2019

The Darker Side of Blogging We web folk tend to look at the olden days of blogging as a simpler time when people on the web would gather for discussions and collaborative experiments. In our tinge of nostalgia, it can be hard to pull down those rose colored glasses. I find myself doing it just […]

A bit of Internet art from creator Vuk Cosic which displays an image rendered in green on black 1's and 0's

A Love Letter to Net.Art

September 17, 2019

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 […]

A debate on CourtTV during the OJ trial

The O.J. Trial Comes Online

August 26, 2019

In Chapter 2 of what I’m calling my complete history, I traced one of the most massive shifts in the history of the web to 1995, a transformative year, it turns out, not just for technology but for the United States generally. A year that, incidentally, also included the trial of O.J. Simpson. To say […]

The W3C official logo

Making the Web For Everyone

July 23, 2019

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 […]

June 2019 Weblog: IPO’s and the New and Old Web

July 1, 2019

IPO’s Old and New Slack had its so-called “non-IPO” this month, which seems to have gone pretty well and came with its own bells and whistles and fanfare. It got me thinking back to other major tech IPO’s, the single largest still being Netscape, which kind of started this whole tech company going public to […]

Screenshot of the MooTools website in 2007

That Time MooTools Almost Broke the Web

June 19, 2019

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. […]

May 2019 Weblog: Ask Me Anything!

May 31, 2019

The web’s history is always being written, and not just by me. So each month I like to go through and share bits of research and great posts that continue to explore the heart and history of the web. It’s my sites own personal weblog. Ask Me Anything If you’ve never been to Cake, it’s […]

April 2019 Weblog: Giving the Web Its Spirit Back

April 30, 2019

The web’s history is always being written, and not just by me. So each month I like to go through and share bits of research and great posts that continue to explore the heart and history of the web. It’s my sites own personal weblog. Bringing Back the Indie Web With the many, many failures […]

What Happens When You Enter a URL In Your Browser of Choice

April 15, 2019

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 […]

Special Announcement Edition: The Web Turns 30 and Time for a Big Change

March 12, 2019

TL;DR I’m changing things up a bit. I’ll still be sharing history, but that history will look a bit different, and come to you little less frequently than every week. First one goes out next week. Also, a redesign! Haven’t signed up yet? Now’s your chance: Thirty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee handed his employers at […]

Google Maps early design

What Does AJAX Even Stand For?

March 4, 2019

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.

The World Wide Web Recap, February 2019

February 25, 2019

Each month, I send out a list of links from my research or around the web. Here’s the very best links I found in February. Recreating the First Web Browser at CERN After rebuilding the first ever website back in 2013, the CERN hack team came back together this year for an even more ambitious […]