Web Turns 30, Seems Popular

The world wide web has officially lasted 30 consecutive years, which means it’s catching up to its parent, the Internet, which itself is bearing down on 50. That’s an important distinction. The Internet is not the web; it is the foundation on which the web was born.

In honor of the web’s 30 years bringing us all manner of useful and useless information via the lowly hyperlink, the World Wide Web Consortium (the standards body behind HTML and CSS, among other standards), the World Wide Web Foundation, and CERN have teamed up to create a 30th anniversary site.

You may recall in 2014 when W3C released its WebAt25.org site (which I wrote about here). That site went offline and the domain was allowed to lapse (purchased by a rando), within the last year. Conveniently WebAt25.org is at the Internet Archive, hopefully preserving it for another 25 years. Remember:

Cool URIs don’t change.

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

For this anniversary, CERN gathered some developers to re-write the first web browser as a client-side script that you can run in your own browser (soon it will be browsers all the way down). You can read some history and documentation, then fire it up and start surfing at worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser (you will need the instructions).

Alternatively, visit the evolt.org browser archive and, if it is not acting up, grab it and even more browsers from the early days of the web.

Then head over to CERN’s World Wide Web project site, dating back to 1993 and the first time HTML documentation was made generally available. Which I remember using. Because I am old as well.

Related

Some other historical bits I have covered on my blog:

• Web Turns 25, Seems Popular, March 12, 2014.
• NCSA Mosaic Turns 20, April 22, 2013.
• WWW Project Turns 20, April 30, 2013.
• Netscape Navigator 2.01 Celebrates 16th Anniversary, March 20, 2012.
• Internet Turns 40, Just Might Catch On, October 30, 2009.