Ye Olde World Wide Webbe (not the Internet which has different birthdays), said to have "emerged from a largely benevolent academic atmosphere", reaches the grand age of thirty, during which time countless website have risen to dominance and fallen into obscurity. To celebrate, Tim is zipping between CERN, London and Nigeria. While browsers have developed, website designs have changed and unevenly more people get online, the underlying issues and uncertain futures perhaps remain. Take the quiz! (20th celebrations in 2009) finish with link to cats here
As always the comments are MetaFilter comments:I’m taking a 30-hour journey with @webfoundation to celebrate the web’s 30th birthday.— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 12, 2019
First stop @CERN — where it all began.
We’ll be visiting London, UK today and finishing in Lagos, Nigeria tomorrow.
Follow the celebrations at #Web30 #ForTheWeb. pic.twitter.com/utQlJC8bNj
Dammit there are a few errors in that post (it's an unchecked draft and I hit post as I had to run outside as a cheese seller of some repute was passing), such as two links being the wrong way round in an unintentionally amusing fashion, but heck am leaving it in a rough-and-ready 1996 HTML way.
That early MetaFilter home page is fascinating, as one user produced 25 FPPs in that week. And is the only one, apart from Matt, posting. Noting he quickly reached 100 FPPs, then stopped submitting them (nearly two decades ago). Hunting around ah an explanation from Matt, and a follow-up comment from a still-active MeFite.
Notepad or Dreamweaver for HTML construction (if you are under 30 then you may need to ask a MeFite what this means)?
posted by Wordshore at 7:19 AM on March 12 [4 favorites]
And in a weird bit of synchronicity, several of my colleagues from the 1990s who busily built websites for digital library services and projects in UK academia, met up at a conference in Birmingham. Someone took a picture and posted it to Twitter....MORE
Nearly all of those websites, services and projects are long gone, and only findable through Internet Archives. A small number still operate (then and now).
posted by Wordshore at 7:27 AM on March 12
So I cannot escape the brutal irony inherent in that WWW "quiz" linked above which manages to include every single piece of internet bullshit that makes me hate using a browser in 2019.
In the words of Brad Frost: Death to Bullshit.
posted by jeremias at 7:17 AM on March 12 [8 favorites]