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The History of the Web

thehistoryoftheweb.com

This project is my decade-long journey through web history. What began as a simple timeline has evolved into an intricate […]

Computing historyWeb developmentFrontend / CSS / browsers

’90’95’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
146 from 25 Dec 1990 to 22 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (9 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/feed/

2026 7

  1. Mommy bloggers react
  2. A website for everyone
  3. Thinking more about Netscape Time
  4. The lasting influence of Netscape Time
  5. Prepping for the endgame of the open web
  6. Did you want that link to be permanent?
  7. Information is still free

2025 16

  1. Chatting about Shadow DOM
  2. What happened to the comment section?
  3. Feeling Less Lonely
  4. Stumbling upon
  5. Do blogs need to be so lonely?
  6. We Are Still the Web
  7. Three attempts at making payments secure
  8. Exploring the web in 1995
  9. Can Directories Rise Again?
  10. The innovative designs of 1995
  11. 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web
  12. Our Online Homes Need Infastructure
  13. Expanding Access: The History of Ecommerce Part 1
  14. What happens to what we’ve already created?
  15. Would the internet exist today if the printing press didn’t come before it?
  16. Progressive enhancement brings everyone in

2024 12

  1. Where did mainstream media come from?
  2. The Free Web
  3. The Website that Predicted AI
  4. It’s Lists All the Way Down
  5. The Gift of Code
  6. Cool URLs Mean Something
  7. Where does SEO come from?
  8. Beware the cloud of hype
  9. The Analog Web
  10. Filling gaps with a polyfill
  11. We’ve been waiting 20 years for this
  12. Rosy Retrospection

2023 6

  1. Building ColdFusion for the web
  2. Remembering Molly, one of the greats
  3. The crash that ended it all
  4. The Dot-com surge
  5. From the valley to the alley
  6. Dot-Com Part 1: Burning up

2020 4

  1. November 2020 Weblog: Weird Web, Independent Web
  2. Everyone Should Have Access to the Web
  3. October 2020 Weblog: Finding the Web and Making Your Place
  4. September 2020 Weblog: Own Your Stuff, Learn About Fanfic

2017 1

  1. Flash And Its History On The Web

2015 1

  1. Sorry Computer, You’re Not a Teapot

2012 1

  1. Getting to the Picture Element

2011 1

  1. The Beginning of Black Girls Code

2010 2

  1. Comparing the “Why” of Single Page App Frameworks
  2. The (Mostly) Complete History of Layout on the Web and Responsive Design

2009 1

  1. Almost (Standards) Doesn’t Count

2008 2

  1. Purple, Obama, and Single Serving Websites
  2. How to Use the Web To Show the Truth

2006 3

  1. The Unlikely Pioneers of the Early Web
  2. Bringing the Laughter, Week after Week
  3. From designing interfaces to designing systems

2005 21

  1. Making a Framework for the Web
  2. A Mini Browser for the Masses
  3. Giving Web Standards a Seat at the Table
  4. Reddit v. Digg: A Difference in Approach
  5. The Browser Engine That Could
  6. That Time MooTools Almost Broke the Web
  7. What Does AJAX Even Stand For?
  8. AJAX without the X: The History of JSON
  9. “Playboy’s body with the New Yorker’s brain”
  10. It’s Time to Pay the Meter
  11. Spiderwoman, Wise-Women: Listservs to connect
  12. Gowalla, Foursquare and the (very) brief history of the Location Wars
  13. The Long Tail of Uselessness
  14. 21st Century Community
  15. Web Components Before Web Components
  16. We Made These Sites for Kids?
  17. The mid-90’s was the era of the City Guide
  18. It’s 1997 And You Want to Take a Flight
  19. Feeling Lonely on the Net
  20. The Right to Link
  21. The Power of the Pixel

2004 4

  1. A Tale of Two Standards
  2. The Many Faces (And Names) of Mozilla
  3. What Happens When Yahoo Acquires You
  4. Checking “Under the Hood” of Code

2003 4

  1. Year of A List Apart
  2. The Rise of CSS
  3. 15 Years of WordPress
  4. An Early History of Web Accessibility

2002 1

  1. The Decade-Long Path to Web Fonts

2001 5

  1. Archiving the Web
  2. The Evolution of Blogging
  3. Finding Our Digital Identities: A History of Social Media
  4. Dreaming Big on the Open Web
  5. Wikipedia: The Story of Collective Knowledge

2000 2

  1. SOAP And REST At Odds
  2. Technocratic Panic at the Millennium and the Real Threat Beneath the Code

1999 5

  1. Let’s Talk About Elections on the Web
  2. The Winding Tale of Neopets
  3. RSS: A Well Formed Log Entry
  4. Before There Were Smartphones, There Was I-Mode
  5. How We Got the Favicon

1998 5

  1. Your Privacy Policy Doesn’t Mean A Thing; Regulating Privacy on the Web
  2. A Short History of WaSP and Why Web Standards Matter
  3. Writing About the Web… On the Web
  4. GoTo: The Forgotten Search Engine
  5. Why You’d Click on ChickClick

1997 6

  1. How Dreamweaver Got Its Name
  2. The History of the Browser Wars: When Netscape Met Microsoft
  3. Pixel Art Finds Its Home on the Web
  4. The Web and the Webbys Grew Together
  5. The HTML Tags Everybody Hated
  6. Plagued by Ads

1996 8

  1. A Look Back at the History of CSS
  2. Content Management Made Simple
  3. A Moment In Time with Editors
  4. Tables for Layout? Absurd.
  5. A Love Letter to Net.Art
  6. Putting Web Accessibility First
  7. Offline Browsing Like It’s 1995
  8. The Day(s) The Web Fought Back

1995 11

  1. The Online World of High Taste and Rock Music
  2. Surfing Through the Digital Airwaves: A History of Internet Radio
  3. The Web After Suck
  4. The 10-Day Programming Language (Is Kind of a Myth)
  5. eBay, API’s, and the Connected Web
  6. A Sense of Community: From Newgrounds to MLKSHK
  7. The History of Rewriting PHP
  8. Why Batman Forever is so Important for the Web
  9. Discovering the True Meaning of the Web
  10. Salon, Slate, and a History of the Tricky Business of Publishing Online
  11. The Books That Shaped How We Learn About the Web

1994 7

  1. An Ode to Geocities
  2. The Linguist and the Programmer
  3. When Rotuma Came to the Web
  4. Making the Web For Everyone
  5. The Window at the Cafe
  6. A Fun List of Browsers You’ve Never Heard Of
  7. They Offered a Million Dollars to Surf The Web. Somebody Won.

1993 3

  1. How We Searched Before Search
  2. Before the Wars, Browsers Were Everywhere
  3. The Origin of the IMG Tag

1992 1

  1. What Happens When You Enter a URL In Your Browser of Choice

1991 4

  1. The First Website in the United States Was Made for Physicists
  2. A Brief History of Hypertext
  3. The Importance of Being on Usenet
  4. What the Web Could Have Been

1990 2

  1. Why Do We Call it a Homepage?
  2. The Web’s First (And Second) Browser