Jay Hoffmann
Making the Web For Everyone
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… Continue reading
That Time MooTools Almost Broke the Web
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.… Continue reading
What Happens When You Enter a URL In Your Browser of Choice
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… Continue reading
What Does AJAX Even Stand For?
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. Continue reading
How to Use the Web To Show the Truth
Ushahidi is a platform that uses the democratizing power of the web to open access to citizen journalists on the ground and shine a light where the truth is hidden. Continue reading
Comparing the “Why” of Single Page App Frameworks
The web is filled with rundowns of this JavaScript framework versus that one. But we don’t often take the time to understand why they were built in the first place. Continue reading
An Early History of Web Accessibility
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. Continue reading
Finding Our Digital Identities: A History of Social Media
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… Continue reading
The Books That Shaped How We Learn About the Web
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. Continue reading
Dreaming Big on the Open Web
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… Continue reading
The Online World of High Taste and Rock Music
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… Continue reading
Your Privacy Policy Doesn’t Mean A Thing; Regulating Privacy on the Web
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… Continue reading