Three Decades of HTML
meyerweb.com
meyerweb.com
He had a book on HTML, CSS, and Perl and was happy to teach me. Together we made a website that was decent for the time despite using far too many iframes. I’ll never forget feeling my brain melt when a CSS class was applied to an element. Magic.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized how strange it was to have a 12-year old computer science teacher and now, decades later, I’m a software developer in large part because of my middle school friend Ryan. Thanks Ryan.
For younger and newer devs, back in '07-'08, Eric Meyer created one of the first popular CSS resets which helped normalize differences between browser vendors.
I run into a lot of front-end devs now who aren't aware of this history. Probably worth mentioning at this point now.
Gopher was a big deal in the early '90s. Someone at the San Jose Mercury News had set up a daily list of news articles, which was important to me as I lived overseas. It was tedious to navigate but it let me access information I couldn't otherwise read.
Around that time the WWW was making mainstream inroads, thanks in part to the Oklahoma City terrorism attack. I remember watching a TV news report that found an early militia website with Timothy McVeigh's personal profile on it. It was a shocking revelation - anyone could publish anything for the world to see. Traditional gatekeepers did not have as much power in this new environment.
Not long thereafter, I downloaded Mosaic onto a gigantic Windows 3.1 laptop with a black and white LCD monitor, found an MIT HTML tutorial, and I was hooked.
The early days before gigantic scripts and inscrutable CSS took over were a joy. It felt possible to do so much with so little - even coding in a simple text editor and the basic Mosaic/Netscape tools.
However, I had computer access whenever I wanted because I helped the local printing press and publishing houses with computers. I will always remember that one IDE/Editor that started me - HotDog[1]. I had saved the files and the work on many floppy disks.
Unfortunately, I left everything behind when I decided to leave my town. The first thing I did after landing in the new city that very afternoon was to go to a cybercafe to create my Hotmail and Yahoo! IDs.
We had a 3d mol viewer and RealAudio :)
I barely touched the Web for the first few months I was online. IRC, FTP and Usenet only. Even email didn't hold much value at the time.
Most of the Web in 1993 was just tutorials on how to write your first web page.
My earliest surviving HTML pages are from about 1997. If I could get hold of the guy, Dustin, who has been maintaining this web site continuously since before 1996, then I could probably find the earliest fragments of my web coding from when I was using that MUD to DM my gf so I could help with the web design/Java applet course she was enrolled in:
http://resworld.eolith.net/res.html
(that's also my first registered domain there, eschaton.net .. I was bummed because NSF had just finally started charging for domains so I had to drop dozens of awesome one-word dotcoms)
I still use his https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/color-blend/#:::hex on localhost.
My first reaction on reading about Mosaic is, on reflection, quite amusing - when I read it I thought "Nice browser but why would anyone want to load a document over a network?" :-)
<html><body>
<h1>hello</h1>
</html> <!-- missing /body -->I know I was building them years before that, but I'm not sure if I could tell you exactly which year I started. I do remember that a lot of my first web pages were hosted on the 1MB (then 2MB) AOL "MyPlace" (which was before AOL Hometown and before the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive). I remember at one point using up all of the AOL account's profiles just to have web pages on them. It was supposed to be a family account, but I was the one most (ab)using it.
My recollection of it, and that recollection is probably all sorts of wrong at this point, that 1MB version of "MyPlace" was one of the launch features around the time of Eternal September (in 1993 or 1994), so it is very possible I was "hosting" web pages as early as 1993. As I recall it, I was building web pages even before that AOL hosting, and mostly "hosting" them just on floppy disks I'd take to school. (Which is the reason I can't rely on my recollection too well here: I was a very precocious 9 in 1993.)
My favorite was the one that made words blink.
I typed things into Notepad, meticulously tabbing and aligning the little tags to make sure it's okay.
Next year I stumbled upon a Taiwanese website somehow, with a call to action for submissions to their design contest.
I made something and sent it. For some miracle I won. They called my jr. high school for it too for some reason and got confused when I answered thinking I was a student in a fancy college in the Americas.
For the award ceremony my mom had to go accept. She was on the way home grocery shopping and didn't understand what the Internet or World Wide Web was. They congratulated her with her shopping bags in hand.
What a wild 30 years to the whole world getting connected.