The History of the Web

A decade before modern day web components, Microsoft had already hit on a formula for their success.

From Yahooligans! to Club Penguin, the kinds of sites we made for kids on the early web were a bit unsteady, but formative and fun for the first web generation.

1996 was the year of the city guide. By 1998, they were already gone.

The mid-2000’s were often referred to as the era of Web 2.0. That may have been an overused term, but it undeniably changed the way designers and developers approached their practice through patterns.

You might be surprised by what options you have. Already, in the late-90’s, travel was abuzz on the web. And the competition was fierce.

There are plenty who make the case that the web makes us lonely. But sometimes, the opposite is true.

In 1995, it would be hard to believe that you could win a million dollars from surfing the web. Then, AOL made it possible.

You can link to anything on the web. That’s a strength. And yet the right to link has been dragged into court on a regular basis for decades. Why is that?

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.

Content Management Systems — software that helps people author and publish websites — likely dates back farther than you think. The problem is, it wasn’t quite called that yet.

People thought a magazine about the web would never work. People thought a magazine about the web on the web would never work. They both did.

There are the browsers that everyone’s heard of. And then there are some that, for whatever reason, faded away. These are the latter.