In 1994 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) formed to help wrangle the web into a standards-based platform. The W3C has persisted and created piles of material for web developers. Pulling from its anniversary post:
Some of the Web Consortium’s most important contributions to the Web include:
Hundreds of open technologies that support search engines, social media, trillions of dollars of online commerce, and more than a billion Web sites;
Technologies and guidelines that enable people with disabilities to access the Web;
Built-in support for communication in many of the world’s languages;
A Patent Policy that helps guarantee that W3C standards may be used by developers without payment of royalty.
While the W3C has had some mis-steps (think XHTML2 and XForms before it came around to work on HTML5 after the WHATWG spun up), it has proven to be a valuable organization for the last quarter century. Between wrangling patent policies, random developers, and vendors, it has been a net positive force.
Today W3C asked people to share their own earliest efforts on the web:
That was just enough motivation for me to put off some project work and start spelunking in the Wayback Machine. Sadly, my earliest stuff (~1993) is not there, but I was able to find some 1996-era awesomeness. While not captured in Netscape Navigator, I did at least capture it at 800×600, just to show out of touch I was with people used between 1994 and 1996. I had gotten much better by 1999.
Jolt Cola
I made a fan page for Jolt Cola. The original version was listed in the first version of Yahoo! and enjoyed some notoriety. Some. By 1996 I had updated it to use <frame>s, primarily because it was my place to experiment with new elements. It may have been over the top.
I lifted the Jolt Cola layout as the basis for my UUAB (a division of Sub-Board I, Inc.) page. The stock imagery was mine — I had purchased a set of CDs to use in my design classes.
Pulse was the entertainment section of Generation magazine (a division of Sub-Board I, Inc.). I had tried to make an overall Generation page, but without a way for the editors to easily maintain it, it died on the vine. The Pulse page never went past what I posted here, and it only got this far because I was motivated by the content.
View the Pulse page and read that sweet KMFDM interview.
Research Institute on Addictions (RIA)
By 1996 I had a full-time job as a webmaster. The updated and redesigned site rolled out in the fall of 1996, also without a content management system behind it. Just me, Windows Notepad, WS_FTP, and emailed instructions (via Pegasus Mail).
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