Talk:History of the World Wide Web/Archive 2

what? (US-centric tag)
Can someone please explain to me just how exactly this article is US-centric? Jersey John (talk) 02:51, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * really: I can't say it why Johnanth tagged the article so! mabdul 05:56, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The article has been apparently wrongly tagged as US-centric for over 2 years. I propose to remove the tag unless there are good reasons to the contrary. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:06, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

What's missing
I've recently greatly expanded the article AOL Hometown, and there's one quote I came upon during research for that that's made me think:


 * "But the fact is, these people were brought online and given a place for themselves. Like a turkey drawn with a child's hand or a collection of snow globes collected from a life well-lived, these sites were hand-made, done by real people, with no agenda or business plan or knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked. They were paying for their accounts, make no mistake – this was often provided to them as a tool combined with their AOL accounts. [...] Some of these websites had existed for a decade. [...]
 * We're talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter."

This current article History of the World Wide Web is all about stuff such as hardware, HTML, and the history of browsers. But that's not so much what brought the masses to the net back in the 90s. It were those quirky, hand-made private little websites with their odd, archaic, gaudy look, private sites on people's pet peeves. It was both making and surfing these whimsical sites in a time when layouts weren't as polished and standardized as they are today. You know, all this fuzzy, technically unsavvy, emotional right-brain, arty, private stuff so different from all the cold (or "left-brained") technology and coding stuff that these pioneers circumvented by using the first WYSIWYG editors that companies and providers gave them. It was, like, social media before it became interactive, it was site owners here and site surfers there, but they didn't come together as "hive-mind user-generated content" yet as does Web 2.0 today. This was Web 1.0 (after the Web 0.5 of mostly-text Usenet), as the public masses first got to know it during the 90s.

So I thought, shouldn't the history of the WWW up to the Dot-Com Bubble around 1999/2000 also communicate the significance of places such as GeoCities (1994), Tripod.com (1995), Angelfire (1996), AOL Hometown (1997 or earlier?), and FortuneCity (1997), all offering simple, private little websites for simple people with no "knowledge, exactly, of how everything under the webservers worked", where they could show their often rather un-techy hobbies to the world and explore other people's pet peeves, those nostalgic days of quirky, handmade, archaic, vintage, gaudy, little private sites that have brought people on the net for the very first time, the significance of all that within the history and growth of the internet into what it is today?

If you think we could have it at this article, I suggest this bit could either go within the section 1992–1995: Growth of the WWW, or at 1996–1998: Commercialization of the WWW. Or do you think it would be more appropriate at History of the internet instead? --79.193.34.164 (talk) 21:46, 21 August 2011 (UTC)


 * What might also be relevant here is the rationale of the Internet Archive as to why they're trying to back up GeoCities as complete as is possible: "GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years." Just as the longer quote above says, all these private little websites of Web 1.0 were "an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history". --79.193.34.164 (talk) 23:57, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

Earlier history and drivers
Three things : the very early history of content in the web seems pretty thin; a timeline with ’what was available’ on this new medium over 1992-1997 would be a great improvement; and there does not seem to be any mention of the first versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer CecilWard (talk) 13:48, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

On kinda Pavel Schilling's invention of the Internet facts
Hypertext first place related with: Argentina, as referenced by a Harvard lady (}, since considering Talmud would imply going back to Gilgamesh. First places related with HTML: Switzerland, UK and Belgium, World1982, since considering IBM would imply going back to Sumerian abacus. Bonus: from the lands (*) of Linux and Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden**. *Although not libros, unfortunately the best online references, books, are copyrighted by an island. **Image found by searching for genome and racism.

Oldest web page
I'm not sure how best to do it, but this surely belongs in the article.— Vchimpanzee  ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 21:08, 25 July 2013 (UTC) -- Quoting from memory, there were also two others, similar to www, called "Archie" and "Veronica", the names of comics characters. 184.147.220.86 (talk) 13:15, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

The Web - Invented in 1989, implemented in the early 1990s.
Tim Berners-Lee states that he invented the Web in 1989 so I have altered the heading "1980-1991: invention of the Web" to "1980 to 1991: Invention and Implementation of the Web". In point of fact, the 1980 ENQUIRE program was not part of the invention of the Web, although ideas were used from it. An invention is usually the initial proposal for something, with an outline of how it should work. Inventions are refined and honed as they are implemented, which is what happened with the Web. This is the "nuts and bolts" (putting it together and getting it up-and-running) phase. The original heading was contradicting the inventor. Sir Tim's own biography site states:

''Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He founded and Directs the World Wide Consortium (W3C) the forum for technical development of the web. He founded the Web Foundation whose mission is that the WWW serves Humanity, and cofounded the Open Data Insitute in London. His research group at MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab ("CSAIL") plans to re-decentralize the web. Tim spends a lot of time fighting for rights such as privacy, freedom and openness of the web''

''A graduate of Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.''

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

(81.158.198.91 (talk) 03:56, 11 February 2015 (UTC))

Tim Berners-Lee - In His Own Words - Robert Calliau Did Not Co-Invent The World Wide Web
This article stated, basically, that Robert Calliau rewrote Tim Berners-Lee original web proposal and inferred that he co-invented the Web. Tim Berners-Lee, on his own site, states that this untrue:

"Robert Cailliau also worked at CERN, in a different division from me. He was the first convert to the web technology after Mike Sendall who originally let me start the project.

Robert put in huge amounts of time and effort into the WWW project. He tried to get official funding for it from CERN. He looked for students who might be interested in working on it, and found several, some of whom, like Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Ari Luotonen, became famous names in later WWW history. He would organize the details with management, and I would technically supervise, though our offices were several minutes walk away across the site. (If CERN had not been an international site, mine would have been on French soil and his on Swiss, so we would have had to show our passports each time!)

Some commentators suggest that Robert co-invented the WWW. To set this straight, he did not invent it. It wasn't his idea. He did not write the specifications for UDIs (later to be URLs, then URIs), or for HTML, the hypertext language, nor HTTP, the protocol, or the code of the original implementation. More than a year after my original proposal (March 1989), while I was working on the code, he wrote a proposal to CERN proposing some staff be allocated to the project. This was a brave thing to do, as CERN was always chronically short of manpower for the huge challenges it had taken on. So Robert put himself out there to claim that effort on WWW was worth it."

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Cailliau

(86.133.124.236 (talk) 02:14, 26 February 2015 (UTC))

However, this is the history as told by Berners-Lee. Maybe it would be fair to cite Robert Cailliau as well, who seems to have a different appreciation of his own role. For instance, in the speech "A short History of the Web" at the launching of the European branch of the W3 Consortium (Paris, 2 November 1995): "Late in the year 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposes a networked Hypertext system for CERN. Robert Cailliau independently proposes a hypertext project for documentation handling inside the laboratory."

Rolandlegrand (talk) 10:30, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

External links modified
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August 28th Revert.


I have reverted to the 29 july 2016 version after Sourcing and therefore founding the info about the 23rd of august 1991 first public appearance of the first page. See CBC Article HERE

Capbat (talk) 19:55, 28 August 2016 (UTC)


 * The article you quote mistakenly repeats an unfounded claim which originated on Wikipedia and wasn't stamped out until I discovered it last week upon seeing the flurry of dubious "Internaut Day" press coverage. This is a beautiful case of citogenesis. Two IP users single-handedly created this hoax:
 * on July 4, 2013, an IP user, and proceeded to create the Internaut article including.
 * on July 20, 2013, another IP followed suit and, see Special:Contributions/187.37.81.128,
 * Both IPs did nothing else ever in Wikipedia. Whether the first IP 179.208.171.8 copied this information from somewhere or just dreamed it up is anyone's guess. Maybe they drank too much on the 4th of July and thought the Web should have its own "Independence Day"? — JFG talk 00:36, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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First web site was... when?
World_Wide_Web The first web site,[16] … was published on 20 December 1990.[17]

Tim_Berners-Lee The first website was built at CERN…. was put online on 6 August 1991 for the first time:[28]

History_of_the_World_Wide_Web On 6 August 1991,[18] Berners-Lee posted a short summary ... This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier.

Can a website be published (Dec 1990), and not be online (til Aug 1991)?

Does “online” there mean outside of CERN?

Is having a web browser crucial? (Can you have a website without a browser?)

(Next question). When did the World Wide Web launch in public?

Is it April 1993 (as per this article: became royalty free)?

MBG02 (talk) 17:28, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Sources and historical documents are quite clear: the first site was built by Tim Berners-Lee while he wrote the WorldWideWeb proof of concept (December 1990), and a public announcement of the Web project on the alt-hypertext news group occurred on 6 August 1991. In the meantime, the CERN web site was indeed online and accessible worldwide; looks like a sentence in the TBL article got this wrong. You can consider 6 August 1991 to be a "public launch", although the system had been demonstrated in public at several events prior to that date. As you noted, April 1993 is just a licensing change endorsed by CERN management. Hope this helps. — JFG talk 19:14, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
 * It does. Thanks.
 * (Re-asking, though) can you say the Dec 1990 website is "World Wide Web"? If not, when did WWW start? And (if it’s different), in public?
 * MBG02 (talk) 14:08, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Transition to https... when?
I hope I'm doing this in the right way... but I wanted to ask: when did the Web transition from mostly http to almost exclusively https? This sounds like an important milestone to me (and I haven't found a mention of https on this page).

Thank you.

La Musique du Hasard 09:23, 6 December 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lamusiqueduhasard (talk • contribs)


 * Let's Encrypt launched their free certificate service in 2016. Sean Brunnock (talk) 18:38, 7 February 2022 (UTC)