History of the Web - Part 1
Tags: webdev, javascript, beginners, programming
Published: 2024-01-17 13:54:55

While the internet has been around for longer than the the World Wide Web, or the Web, in today's day and age the Web is changing so rapidly.

It is worth taking a look back into where it all started.

##A love letter to the personal website

If we thought Web 1.0 was dead, a 2-day [Stack Skills](https://stackskills.com/) conference in London (2022), considered it fun to resurrect that dead thought from the grave. The conference focused on the history of the Web, Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and challenges ahead for Web 3.0.

Full disclosure right up front.  

This site is the result of the influence that the speakers had on my thought processes as an emerging developer.

Topics covered

What is the difference between Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 ?

Dangers of the cancel culture for Web 3.0

Pure CSS Games - hey no blinking JavaScript

Assistive technologies - why Web 1.0 worked better with just HTML

Additional Resources

## What is the difference between Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 ?

The theme of the 2-day conference, was to take us through a brief history of the [World Wide Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web), or the Web, starting with HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), reminding us that a combination of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are perfect tools to build any website. All that JavaScript added was the browser wars and bugs...

Here is a brief time-line of the transition points between the 3 versions of the Web:

1980s and 1990s - The Web, which was invented by collaborators, [Robert Cailliau](https://www.cailliau.org/Welcome.html) and [Tim Berners-Lee](https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/) in the 1980s, was conceived as a document sharing amongst academics, was built on HTML, with URLs (Unique Resource Locators) - that linked the documents and gave academics access to scientific research.

Web 1.0 started as a document storage and sharing experiment at a particle physics organisation, [CERN](https://home.cern/), the introduction of CSS in the 1990s, by [Håkon Wium Lie](https://www.wiumlie.no/en), ideas which he developed with [Bert Bos](https://www.w3.org/People/Bos/), provided more opportunities for pepping-up the typewriter-style printed page that was a bit dull and difficult to read.

Sophie Koonin's introductory talk, _“A love letter to the personal website,”_ was a tribute to the loss of the personal websites of the 1990s - websites for the creative pleasure of the individual not for profit of conglomerates.

Kooky sites like [Sadgrl](https://sadgrl.online/), Koonin demonstrated were examples of the next phase in the development of the Web where people built sites for fun, self-expression and creativity.

It was not just with content, but with top-level-domains (TLDs), that content creators showed creativity.

TLDs are the final extension of a web name, for example `.com`. If you look at the sites, `https://carol.gg/` and `https://ghost.computer/` the unusual TLDs were expressions of the individual. Today, everyone wants a `.com` which is easily recognisable globally.

Even if TLDs were not creative, secondary-domain names, which are the memorable part of the domain name, before the `.com` extention, were truly memorable - `https://lynnandtonic.com/` and `https://darn.es/` showed the creative flair that early developers had.

Some of this creative flair has been retained, Koonin concedes, `google` being an example. Today's creative naming seems to be more about brand building than self-expression. This is the point of difference between a name like `lynnandtonic` which simply was an expression of Stephanie Eckles, a CSS specialist's creative flair, Koonin pointed out.

Another common feature of these sites are they are all built in HTML and CSS with no JavaScript in sight. The purpose of early websites of the 1990s were to be creative and full of personality to mark the developer's individuality on the Web.  

Web 2.0 was coined in 1999 by [Darci DiNucci](http://darcyd.com/), whose personal website displays all the characteristics of Web 1.0 static pages - no email form, you need to download a CV which is stored on a URL rather than a database, limited CSS and no JavaScript. The name Web 1.0 was retrofitted by DiNucci, a UI-UX and technical writer, to differentiate Web 2.0 which was more feature rich.

One of the early movers to shift the dynamic of the Web, as a document storage system for academics and researchers, was the content generator, [My Space](https://myspace.com/). The site started the shift towards UGC (user-generated-content).

Web 2.0, played to DiNucci's strengths - a focus on the user-experience(UX), personalisation of the user-journey with UXD (UX-Design frameworks), data stored server-side with Application Protocol Interfaces (APIs) making it easy to use a variety of resources on a web page.

The increased use of APIs, along with improved UI-UXD, encouraged more users to post blogs, comments, reactions, photographs, images making the Web more interconnected and devices and infrastructures more interoperable. At this stage UGC  was the shift from developer-generated content.

As a precursor to Web 2.0 where UGC was more common, in Koonin’s opinion, was the success of MySpace which ruined the Web for indie sites. The term Web 2.0, was only widely adopted in 2004 in a conference where DiNucci's original terminology to differentiate the 2 versions of the Web was viralised.

The general word of caution on Web 2.0, from Koonin, is that although it has influenced a whole generation of content creators to flock to social media sites, it has also spelt the death of the creative impulse of self-expression and a risk towards all sites looking like cookie-cutter imprints of each other. If you do see the My Space site, for example, it has suffered from this general trend.

While individuality is lost and customisation is limited, the real danger lies in algorithms harvest data and generate feeds of echo-chamber information, Koonin said.

The discussion about Web 3.0 started around 2006, where mobile distruption and bigger data with all its infrastructure, capacity and privacy issues grew exponentially. Social media sites which started with MySpace, today include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter and the like, have resulted in a more ominous trend - the cancel culture, Koonin said.

## Dangers of the cancel culture for Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is not really a "thing" as it has not been designed, defined and its characteristics - big data, use of emerging technologies like AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), block chain are making significant departures from what Web 2.0 looked like.

Koonin also said Web 2.0 needed a reset as the cancel culture will slowly lead to content loss when these sites are taken down as a UGC provider is in the eye of a social media storm.

Content generators now need to think of uncreative content guidelines - search-engine-optimisation and other engagement metrics  as well as social and political correctness - taking the fun out of building a personal website.

Emergent technlogies like AI, interconnected devices with IoT (the Internet of Things) and NFC (Near Field Communication), will alogorithmize content many human interactions. This has the potential of rendering content we consume devoid of human intelligence and actions we take devoid of human intervention. This will all be in the name of convenience, speed and removing the nature of individuals, prone errors and creative rather than programmed logic.

Pointing us to [Indie Web](https://indieweb.org/) and [Yester Web](https://yesterweb.org/) which aim to “reclaim the Web,” the movement encourages developers to harken back to the past and create a personal website which is not dependent on pre-built templates like WordPress, Wix and Square Space offer but on vanilla HTML and CSS.

Koonin suggests we turn this paradigm on its head and join the [POSSE](https://indieweb.org/POSSE) - the movement to Publish on your Own Site and Syndicate Everywhere.

The challenge for developers with this spartan approach - using pure HTML and CSS - is the lack of tools and options that JavaScript offer.

A shibbolith that Elad Schechter, who was the next speaker, aimed to dismiss. It is hard to convince a crowd of developers who are keen to learn the next best thing that going backwards is the way forwards, but it certainly made me think in new ways about how to approach what has become a significantly over-engineered space.

## Pure CSS Games - hey no blinking JavaScript

Schechter, talk _“How to Create Pure CSS Games”_, used clever CSS tricks like checkboxes and radio-buttons with CSS animations.

Schechter ran through how he created a CSS counter for his games and animations. Pseudo classes, sibling selectors in conjunction with CSS animations like transform-rotate helped providing an illusion of movement - proving you do not blinking well need JavaScript.

He did caveat-emptor this by saying he used an HTML pre-processor. A pre-processor takes HTML and CSS code and processes it in advance so that it renders more efficiently (quickly) on the Web.

Schechter created atoms of coronavirus with blinking eyes, elements appearing and disappearing, movement of these atoms across the page using and CSS attributes like display-block and display-none or setting opacity at various levels.

Worth checking out is [Elad2412 on CodePen](https://codepen.io/elad2412/) for more inspiration.
## Assistive technologies - why Web 1.0 worked better with just HTML

On a more serious note, Sam Prioux, highlighted how Web 2.0 creates more complexity and less accessibility to visually challenged users.

Web 1.0 offered text-to-speech screen readers and since most of the Web was HTML, this made the early Web much more universally accessible. Text could also be printed to braille.

Today with text layered with images, audio, and video there are still tools to make the Web more accessible. Command Line Interface (CLI) tools, image recognition tags, voice recognition, video-magnification, and accessibility APIs.

Hardware and software developers, Prioux said, need to work together as computer central processing units (CPUs), and compute-power, can be slow with speech recognition. Commercial [assistive technologies](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/assistive-technology) are in their infancy and need to be further developed.

Web 2.0 and mobile disruption with touchscreens, more event-driven behaviours on-clicks, on-blur, on-mouse-in and out, icons that point to these events, rather than words made Web 2.0 a difficult space to navigate for those who needed accessibility to be built into the programming and hardware. 

Event-driven behaviour is when the user is expected to interact with a web page for an action to occur. In the examples above, when the user is expected to click a link, if they hover over a form field that then becomes blurred to the vision, when the mouse is moved on a trackpad.

It was not till Apple introduced touch-screen accessibility that hardware caught up with the needs of computer accessibility to the community who needed additional support, Prioux said.

However, web standards for accessibility, browser extensions and API capabilities are still not fully understood and both hardware and software developers need to think of future accessibility not just play catch up. AR (Augmented Reality) technologies like VR (Virtual Reality), new crypto currencies - are just a few Prioux mentioned.

He also warned of privacy and biases in the field of assistive technology. A lot more work needs to be done with the community in UI-UXD (user-interface and user-experience-design).

Prioux, provided an inspiring and insightful look into the plethora of options to be creative and ensure accessibility to prevent abuse of privacy and stop biases across devices.

AI promises to revolutionise accessibility, he also pointed developers to think of customisation for accessibility or creating separate but equal experiences for assistive technologies that help the enjoyment and ease of use.  

On a seriously light-hearted note, Herve Aniglo, talked about teaching children to code with music using [Sonic PI](https://sonic-pi.net/), a language agnostic platform that helps you learn recursions, looping, circuit breaking and functional programming by creating simple tunes.  

Python, JavaScript, and Ruby are languages that can be learnt by programming sounds for synthesisers. Conversely, it is also a tool for programmers to learn how to read and write music.

Music and sound, Aniglo said, bring tech to a wider audience and is a great introduction to children learning the Web. One of the sections on Berners-Lee's site is the section for kids where he explains particle physics in simple terms. It is also a great reference for Koonin's examples of a Web 1.0 site.

In [Part2 - Enter the browser with the JavaScript dragon](https://sumisastri.github.io/dev-blogs/history-of-the-web/part2-web2.0/), I have aggregated the talks on JavaScript together to tell a story. The theme of this next section questions if JavaScript really the big, bad wolf of the Web or just another coding language, a tool at our disposal.

[My tech blogs home page](https://sumisastri.github.io/dev-blogs/)

### Additional Resources

- [Wikipedia Robert Cailliau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau)

- [CSS Tricks and Preprocessors](https://css-tricks.com/comparing-html-preprocessor-features/)