The History of the Web

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The Book

“Playboy’s body with the New Yorker’s brain”

Published: January 1, 2005

On the early web, some content pioneers experimented with interactive, community-fed, literate smut.

AJAX without the X: The History of JSON

Published: January 1, 2005

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.

Features

A Tale of Two Standards

Published: June 3, 2004

It was 2004, and Ian Hickson had just got out of a W3C workshop organized by Adobe. The topic was how […]

Features

The Many Faces (And Names) of Mozilla

Published: February 9, 2004

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.

Features

What Happens When Yahoo Acquires You

Published: February 4, 2004

I could have titled this “A Tale of Two Acquisitions,” but I already used that one. Still, we’re going to […]

Checking “Under the Hood” of Code

Published: January 1, 2004

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.

Features

Year of A List Apart

Published: May 23, 2003

I’d really recommend reading a thread on Eric Meyer’s blog from early 2007. In it, he poses a pretty simple […]

Features

The Rise of CSS

Published: May 1, 2003

The web’s history is filled to the brim with stops and starts and wrong turns. It is a technology that […]

Features

15 Years of WordPress

Published: April 1, 2003

It was January of 2003, and 19 year old blogger and amateur programmer Matt Mullenweg was distraught. In a post […]

Features

An Early History of Web Accessibility

Published: March 14, 2003

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.

Features

The Decade-Long Path to Web Fonts

Published: August 2, 2002

The web has a long and storied history with text, typography and fonts. Most content on the web is text. And at […]

Features

Archiving the Web

Published: October 24, 2001

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.

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The History of the Web is a project by Jay Hoffmann. Get in touch.