Hypertext history

I’m not a big fan of acronyms in general but I like the word WWILF: What Was I Looking For. It’s such a webby word.

You know the drill: you start looking at a Wikipedia page about zeppelin crashes and before you know it, you’re reading about ekranoplans and Dyson spheres. That’s wwilfing.

Interestingly, there’s no Wikipedia entry for wwilfing. Maybe it should just redirect to the page about the World Wide Web.

I’ve found the wwilfing motherlode for markup nerds like me: The Early History of HTML. It’s a short document, but each link will send you down a rabbit hole of geek history.

Thrill to the original code by Tim Berners-Lee for parsing hypertext! Gasp at the first document ever published on the web!

Interestingly, that first ever web page almost validates as HTML5. It’s just missing a doctype, which—as the spec makes clear—is only required for legacy reasons. Oh, the irony!

As an aside, the world’s first ever web site went live exactly nineteen years ago on August 6th, 1991. I know that because the front page of Wikipedia had it listed under “On this day…” I was wwilfing again.

Back to that document about the early history of HTML… it’s a fascinating look at the origins of many of the elements that we use to build web pages today. I knew that HTML was based on SGML but I always thought that Sir Tim came up with the elements in HTML Tags himself. It turns out that many of the elements come directly from an existing flavour of SGML already in use at CERN called GMLguide.

That’s a textbook example of the design principles that are now codified for HTML5:

• support existing content,
• do not reinvent the wheel,
• pave the cowpaths and
• evolution, not revolution.

Speaking of HTML5, check out this excerpt from an email Tim Berners-Lee sent to Dan Connolly in 1991, describing how HTML should work:

I would in fact prefer, instead of <H1>, <H2> etc for headings [those come from the AAP DTD] to have a nestable <SECTION>..</SECTION> element, and a generic <H>..</H> which at any level within the sections would produce the required level of heading.

That’s right: the outline algorithm for sectioning content in HTML5 was first proposed nineteen years ago!

If you’re as fascinated as I am by the history of the web, you’ll enjoy re-reading the original proposal by Tim Berners-Lee for a global hypertext system, which is famously described as vague but exciting. I’m struck by the relevance of the opening problem statement, Losing Information at CERN:

The problems of information loss may be particularly acute at CERN, but in this case (as in certain others), CERN is a model in miniature of the rest of world in a few years time. CERN meets now some problems which the rest of the world will have to face soon.

The proposed solution—what would become the World Wide Web—is ingenious:

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness of the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.

The original problem still remains. The web hasn’t solved the problem of data loss but it has provided us with the means to quickly and easily share incredible amounts of data …but will that data simply disappear again?

Old CSS, new CSS / fuzzy notepad

I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.

In the beginning, there was no CSS.

This was very bad.

Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.

The Lost tags of HTML

I’ll be in my bunk.

Everything Easy is Hard Again – Frank Chimero

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.

I saw Frank give this talk at Mirror Conf last year and it resonated with me so so much. I’ve been looking forward to him publishing the transcript ever since. If you’re anything like me, this will read as though it’s coming from directly inside your head.

In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago.

I could just keep quoting the whole thing, because it’s all brilliant, but I’ll stop with one more bit about the increasing complexity of build processes and the decreasing availability of a simple view source:

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have). And the best way to help someone write markup is to make sure they can read markup.

Occasionally, people e-mail me to say something along the lines of “I’ve come up with something to replace HTML!”.

Five years ago, Hixie outlined the five metrics that a competitor to the web would have to score well in:

1. Be completely devoid of any licensing requirements.
2. Be vendor-neutral.
3. Be device-neutral and media-neutral.
4. Be content-neutral.
5. Be radically better than the existing Web.

You come at the king, you best not miss.

Web History Primer

Written in 2001, this history of the web takes in CERN, hypertext, the ARPANET, SGML, and lots more.