The History of the Web

The earliest work with selling things online was all about reaching a shopping public ready to log on and start. But along the way, they found a whole new audience for shopping, which changed the way we think about commerce on the web..

The breakthroughs of the web are often compared to the printing press. But could the former exist without the latter?

Early computers faced unexpected failures, and that gave us graceful degradation. But on the web, we needed something different. We needed progressive enhancement.

I just learned that Molly Holzschlag has passed. She was a tireless advocate for the principles of the open web. […]

As the dot-com hype began to rise, entrepreneurs and ordinary investors got swept up in the fervor.

The Flatiron building is one of the most instantly recognizable buildings in New York City. Built at the beginning of […]

Chapter 11: Dot-Com is live! Part 1 at least. I’m going to be sending out this chapter over the next couple […]

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.

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

News used to be behind a paywall, or not. But then a publication figured out how to do both.

Way before social media, listservs acted as a glue that held the web community together.

When the iPhone was released, two apps rushed to market in a battle over geolocation that would come to be briefly known as the “location wars”