Eric’s Archived Thoughts: The Web Behind

Internet Artifacts

I love this timeline of internet firsts. Best of all:

You may touch the artifacts

The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!

404PageFound – Active Vintage Websites, Old Webpages, and Web 1.0

Well, this is rather lovely! A collection of websites from the early days of the web that are still online.

All the HTML pages still work today …and they work in your web browser which didn’t even exist when these websites were built.

Running Code Over Time – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

We should think of our code, even our designs, as running for decades, and alter our work to match.

WorldWideWeb, 30 years on – Dan Q

This is a lovely write-up of the WorldWideWeb hack week at CERN:

The Web is a success story in open standards, natural and by-design progressive enhancement, and the future-proof archivability of human-readable code.

The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)

I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:

This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.

And they all have.

And they are all different.

Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:

The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.

Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.