Features
Main stories, part of the timeline
Before the Wars, Browsers Were Everywhere
Before browsers were truly cross-platform, there was a time when each operating system had their browser of choice, and it was tailored to the needs of those users. Continue reading
Let’s Talk About Elections on the Web
The politics of campaigns have been massively influenced by the tonal shift of the web, and they will likely never be the same. Continue reading
The Linguist and the Programmer
A history of Perl, Python, and the websites that rely on them. Continue reading
The First Website in the United States Was Made for Physicists
Tim Berners-Lee has said, on multiple occasions, the the first website in the US was one of the major reasons the web took off. But what did it do and why was it so important? Continue reading
The Web and the Webbys Grew Together
The Webby Awards was founded way back when no one knew if the web would take off. When we take a look at the Webbys, we see the web’s history. Continue reading
Sorry Computer, You’re Not a Teapot
You are reading this somewhere. On your laptop or on your phone or in your email or RSS reader. If you’re reading this on the web, then this page was delivered from my server to you via a protocol called HTTP. There’s all sorts of fascinating things I can say about HTTP, but the important… Continue reading
The 10-Day Programming Language (Is Kind of a Myth)
In 1995, Netscape Navigator was enjoying a meteoric rise to the top of the browser market. They had only released the first version of their browser a year prior, but already it was a crowd favorite and was bolstering the growing popularity of the web. But employees at Netscape were constantly looking over their shoulder, knowing full… Continue reading
A Love Letter to Net.Art
In an interview for her book Internet Art in 2004, writer Rachel Greene had this to say about why she felt the subject of her book was so important: I refuse to let commercial interests dominate the history and perception of the net because I think they would exclude the most important and dynamic internal content… Continue reading
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