Features
Main stories, part of the timeline
eBay, API’s, and the Connected Web
There’s this story about Ebay and Pez that used to go around. It goes something like this: Pierre Omidyar, the founder of Ebay, was looking for something to do after moving to San Jose from Boston and selling his first startup, an ecommerce pen computing platform named eShop, to Microsoft. At the time, Omidyar’s fiancee… Continue reading
The HTML Tags Everybody Hated
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 of the original building blocks of the web, and its used by web developers to mark-up (or describe) a page with agreed-upon HTML tags that, when rendered by a browser, spits out a website. The agreed-upon part… Continue reading
The Evolution of Blogging
By 2001, the world blog had entered Internet vernacular, both as a noun and a verb. Mena Trott was one of these bloggers. Her site, A Dollar Short, went up in April of 2001. With the launch of her site, Trott aimed big. She loved blogging, and she aspired to be one of the best. So she set… Continue reading
Flash And Its History On The Web
Flash is a definitive part of the web’s history. And like many technologies that get caught in the web’s web, it has a rather storied history of its own. But from basically the beginning, it’s development has run parallel to the web’s. Flash got started, conceptually, the day that Jonathan Gay met Charlie Jackson at… Continue reading
Wikipedia: The Story of Collective Knowledge
Wikipedia is a free, online, user-edited and user-contributed encyclopedia. It is also a stupendously simple and almost inevitable idea, but has proven to be nothing short of revolutionary. Certainly, much has been made of Wikipedia over the years. It has served as a case study for the reliability of truth within crowd-sourced material, the strength… Continue reading
How We Got the Favicon
The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck. Continue reading
The Importance of Being on Usenet
Ever wondered how people found about the web. The first transmission of its existence was a digital one, a Usenet post that sparked a following of early web pioneers. Continue reading
The Window at the Cafe
Thanks to the web, in 1999 (or thereabouts), you might find yourself at home, staring at the virtual window of your computer screen, looking out the very real windows of your favorite cyber café. Continue reading
SOAP And REST At Odds
Computer programmers like to squabble. I suppose this is true in any profession, but it is most certainly true for programmers. Don’t believe me? Just ask a programmer if you should set up your web services using SOAP or REST. Then grab a cup of coffee, because it’s going to be a while. It would… Continue reading
The History of the Browser Wars: When Netscape Met Microsoft
Let’s talk about about the “Browser Wars.” They kicked off in the mid-90s, at a time when the world was just starting to come online. The web was still a fuzzy, undefined medium. Those who did decide to visit the web for the first time found themselves standing at the precipice of a technological arms race between two behemoth… Continue reading
Putting Web Accessibility First
Quite frankly, my feeling is that the primary reason why the web is not accessible or not wholly accessible to people with disabilities today is because individuals with disabilities are not considered as part of the core population when we created the web and web sites and even in its initial design. -Mike Paciello The… Continue reading
A Moment In Time with Editors
Let’s go back to 1996, in Boston, at the annual Macworld Expo. Not a great year for Apple mind you. It wouldn’t be until a year later that Steve Jobs would make his return, and sales were at an all time low. But it was an excellent time for the web. In June of 1995… Continue reading
