The History of the Web

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Getting to the Picture Element

Published: August 20, 2018

The story of how responsive images made its way into the browser doubles as an inside look at the standards […]

Features

Almost (Standards) Doesn’t Count

Published: March 12, 2018

In 2008, the team at Microsoft found themselves in quite the pickle. Let me back up. In 2002, the team […]

Giving Web Standards a Seat at the Table

Published: January 19, 2022

In 2007, the web standards project entered the scene once more to push Microsoft to build its most standards-compliant browser to date.

Features

A Tale of Two Standards

Published: April 17, 2017

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

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The Rise of CSS

Published: April 10, 2017

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

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An Early History of Web Accessibility

Published: January 14, 2019

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

A Short History of WaSP and Why Web Standards Matter

Published: March 26, 2018

This article was originally published in CSS-Tricks. In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a […]

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The HTML Tags Everybody Hated

Published: August 28, 2017

It’s easy to forget that HTML, which is an extremely simple programming language, is actually just an exceedingly complex markup language. HTML was one […]

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Tables for Layout? Absurd.

Published: May 1, 2017

Web designers that cut their teeth in the late 90’s and early 2000’s probably remember table-based layouts. This was a […]

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Putting Web Accessibility First

Published: June 6, 2017

Quite frankly, my feeling is that the primary reason why the web is not accessible or not wholly accessible to […]

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Making the Web For Everyone

Published: July 23, 2019

I talked a bit about the importance of the WWW Wizards Workshop last time in my recap on the importance […]

Features

The Origin of the IMG Tag

Published: March 7, 2017

Why is it the <img> tag instead of the <image> tag? The answer, it turns out, dates back to one of the web’s earliest browsers and one of the web’s earliest discussions.

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