The History of the Web

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SOAP And REST At Odds

Published: June 26, 2017

Computer programmers like to squabble. I suppose this is true in any profession, but it is most certainly true for […]

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Technocratic Panic at the Millennium and the Real Threat Beneath the Code

Published: July 2, 2018

It’s been over seventeen years since the world ended. Or, rather, it was supposed to be The End of the […]

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Let’s Talk About Elections on the Web

Published: March 3, 2020

The politics of campaigns have been massively influenced by the tonal shift of the web, and they will likely never be the same.

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The Winding Tale of Neopets

Published: April 16, 2018

Neopets was a massively successful and inclusive digital world, but I think people focus far too much on its advertising […]

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RSS: A Well Formed Log Entry

Published: May 15, 2017

How would you structure a feed for syndicating blog content? Remember, it would need to be standard enough for a computer […]

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Before There Were Smartphones, There Was I-Mode

Published: April 25, 2017

In January of 1999, members of DoCoMo held a press conference in Tokyo, attended by only a handful of people. At […]

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How We Got the Favicon

Published: July 24, 2017

The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck.

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Your Privacy Policy Doesn’t Mean A Thing; Regulating Privacy on the Web

Published: September 4, 2018

In the beginning, the web had no memory. When you followed a link to a new page, everything you did […]

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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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Writing About the Web… On the Web

Published: February 2, 2021

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.

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GoTo: The Forgotten Search Engine

Published: May 22, 2018

I’ve been digging into the history of search engines and centralized platforms lately. Mostly my goal has been to uncover […]

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Why You’d Click on ChickClick

Published: September 16, 2020

When two sisters hit the web with their new idea, it was unlike anything anyone had seen. That one site, ChickClick, inspired so many more and crafted a foundational network of the early web.

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