CONNECT THE WEB'S BUILDING BLOCKS

Discover how to pick the perfect materials to build powerful sites with Jeremy Keith

- Jeremy Keith

On 12 March 1989, a young computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee published a memo. He was working at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. The thousands of scientists working there needed a way of collaborating over the internet. Berners-Lee had a potential solution. He published his idea under the title Information Management: A Proposal.

It wasn’t exactly a page-turner and the diagrams were completely incomprehensible. But there was enough there to get the project started. This project became the world wide web. Within a year of publishing his initial proposal, Berners-Lee created the first version of HTML, the first web server and the first web browser. The browser was somewhat confusingly named WorldWideWeb.

Thirty years on from the original proposal for the world wide web, a group of designers and developers gathered together for a week at CERN to recreate the experience of using that first ever web browser. You can see the final result at worldwideweb.cern.ch.

Amazingly, you can browse websites made today in a browser that was made three decades ago. There won’t be any styling. There won’t be any scripting. Neither CSS nor JavaScript existed at the birth of the web. But if a website has been built in a robust way, it will still make sense even when viewed in an ancient web browser.

EXTENDING THE WEB

Scientific collaboration was the first use-case for the world wide web but the project wasn’t designed to be limited to that usage. Berners-Lee knew that he couldn’t predict how the web would be used in the future. He therefore designed it to be extensible.