Francesco Schwarz

Jay Hoffman teamed up with CSS-Tricks to deliver an ongoing series about the history of the web.

The first chapter is titled “Birth” and speaks about how the WWW came to be. It’s a captivating read. I especially like the quote

Vague, but exciting…

This is a comment by Mike Sendall, who was Berners-Lee’s boss at the time. He wrote it as a note on the first formal proposal for the WWW titled “Information Management, a Proposal” by Berners-Lee from 1989.

Today, as you know, the web is

[…] used by billions of people and runs through everything we do. It is among the most remarkable technological achievements of the 20th century.

Looking forward to this series.

This is a treasure.

A semi-weekly dose of the best stories from the web’s history delivered straight to your inbox!

I came across this website via an article circulating my Twitter timeline this week called What Happened to the Webmaster by Jay Hoffmann which is a beauty in itself. Really nicely done, and the screenshots in the article will make your heart melt. I mean: who can resist the freshness and sexiness of the homepage for a Chicago Museum from the year 1995?!

Kidding aside, I really appreciate the work that went into this and the explanation of how the role of the webmaster really never disappeared.

But the webmaster role, the one we created thirty years ago? That’s still there. Because that role built the web and the web is a part of us. We can’t shake it loose. It’s begging us to do something different. I see it all the time. I see it every time we outwardly express one of the fundamental qualities of the web creator.

I could read this kind of web philosophy all day long.