Web Development History – Internet history for the technically curious | Hacker News Reader

Web Development History – Internet history for the technically curious

webdevelopmenthistory.com

124 pointsptx15 comments

I like the tidbit about how <IMG> came to be:

  Date: Thu, 25 Feb 93 21:09:02 -0800
  From: Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
  Subject: proposed new tag: IMG
  
  I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:
  
  IMG
  
  Required argument is SRC="url".
  
  ...

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0182.ht...

The same www-talk mailing list also included emails from Tim Berners-Lee and Guido van Rossum:

http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/

Guido circa 1993:

> I have written a robot that does this, except it doesn't check for valid SGML -- it just tries to map out the entire web. I believe I found roughly 50 or 60 different sites.. It took the robot about half a day (a saturday morning) to complete.

Do I understand correctly that there were only 60 sites on the entire web?

Looking at the history of the web on Wikipedia, apparently so.

> [Berners-Lee] got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format.

> The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet on 23 August 1991. The Web was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created.

> CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use.

Strongly product-oriented/Proper-Noun-centric view of it. There's good stuff here, but the eras felt more amorphous & fluid, different people riffing with ideas in different ways. The presentation here feels distorting, contorts things into a Great Man view of history that doesn't feel representative of the times.

I forget the guys name, and I think I have it wrong, but Raymond Cheng or some name like that has an excellent 3+ part writeup of the web, that I thought was a lot more respectful of protocols & iteration & change. And much more inclusive of the front end, where-as this feels dominated more by back end concerns. Front end basically dicides up html, css, and js and calls it a day?

I'd love to read the writeup if you find it.

You might be thinking of Microsoft's Raymond Chen? I'd be surprised if he's written about the web in depth

Was frontend during that time consisting of more things?

History is always bunk if you lived it.

I was expecting some RFC's like https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2068 or talk about RESTful concepts but they go on name-dropping to ...make it more interesting? In my book of knowledge web is a protocol described in an RFC. The rest of the stuff rides on top so I was expecting to see the a description of the evolution of such protocol. Netscape (danm you cookies!), PhP, Adobe Flash (Oh boy) is not the history of the bar but the history of the celebrities who frequent the joint.

I'm only a few articles in at the moment, but I really like it so far. Yes, it's not as technical as RFC's would be, but it's still quite enjoyable as leisurely reading.

Yeah, that's what I thought as well. It pulls together screenshots, photos, code snippets, quotes and links to historical documents. The RFCs don't have this stuff.

(Maybe I shouldn't have included the "for the technically curious" part in the title when I submitted it, since it isn't focused on the most technical parts?)

I mean, my mom would not understand most of the stuff there, so I'd say it's technical enough, and saying "technically curious" seems an apt description to me, especially since RFC's would be for people who are much further along the rabbit hole than just "curious", imo. I may be a technical person, but I'm much more of a fan of this story-telling form of content than the hardcore manual stuff.

I guess local overrides are the modern take on the spirit of the original "client" (dual function browser/editor) but it doesn't feel the same...

Is there an equivalent history for Java server side development i.e. the evolution from Servlets -> Servlets + JSP -> Frameworks like Struts 2 -> Spring Web -> Spring MVC -> Spring Boot.

Does it miss the internet and all these other protocol. Obviously www the one way link won. But email, ftp, bulletin board, AOL, news group, … all serve along side for quite awhile as www is very consumption and server-centric oriented, not exactly the original idea of internet. Even mp3, file sharing, peer to peer network are all important.

In brief whilst important www might be a mistake, a cancer to the original internet (even ARPANET idea of survival of nodes …).

I'd like to see a history that notes all the points where a large unforced error was made in a technical decision: img tag instead of object, JavaScript, font tag, etc.

The story behind reverse FTP connections is kind of mind-blowing.

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