22 items tagged “w3c”
2024
1991-WWW-NeXT-Implementation on GitHub. I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole today trying to answer that question about when World Wide Web Day was first celebrated. I found my way to www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/ - an Apache directory listing of the source code for Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb application for NeXT!
The code wasn't particularly easy to browse: clicking a .m file would trigger a download rather than showing the code in the browser, and there were no niceties like syntax highlighting.
So I decided to mirror that code to a new repository on GitHub. I grabbed the code using wget -r and was delighted to find that the last modified dates (from the early 1990s) were preserved ... which made me want to preserve them in the GitHub repo too.
I used Claude to write a Python script to back-date those commits, and wrote up what I learned in this new TIL: Back-dating Git commits based on file modification dates.
End result: I now have a repo with Tim's original code, plus commit dates that reflect when that code was last modified.
Today’s research challenge: why is August 1st “World Wide Web Day”? Here's a fun mystery. A bunch of publications will tell you that today, August 1st, is "World Wide Web Day"... but where did that idea come from?
It's not an official day marked by any national or international organization. It's not celebrated by CERN or the W3C.
The date August 1st doesn't appear to hold any specific significance in the history of the web. The first website was launched on August 6th 1991.
I posed the following three questions this morning on Mastodon:
- Who first decided that August 1st should be "World Wide Web Day"?
- Why did they pick that date?
- When was the first World Wide Web Day celebrated?
Finding answers to these questions has proven stubbornly difficult. Searches on Google have proven futile, and illustrate the growing impact of LLM-generated slop on the web: they turn up dozens of articles celebrating the day, many from news publications playing the "write about what people might search for" game and many others that have distinctive ChatGPT vibes to them.
One early hint we've found is in the "Bylines 2010 Writer's Desk Calendar" by Snowflake Press, published in January 2009. Jessamyn West spotted that on the book's page in the Internet Archive, but it merely lists "World Wide Web Day" at the bottom of the July calendar page (clearly a printing mistake, the heading is meant to align with August 1st on the next page) without any hint as to the origin:
I found two earlier mentions from August 1st 2008 on Twitter, from @GabeMcCauley and from @iJess.
Our earliest news media reference, spotted by Hugo van Kemenade, is also from August 1st 2008: this opinion piece in the Attleboro Massachusetts Sun Chronicle, which has no byline so presumably was written by the paper's editorial board:
Today is World Wide Web Day, but who cares? We'd rather nap than surf. How about you? Better relax while you can: August presages the start of school, a new season of public meetings, worries about fuel costs, the rundown to the presidential election and local races.
So the mystery remains! Who decided that August 1st should be "World Wide Web Day", why that date and how did it spread so widely without leaving a clear origin story?
If your research skills are up to the challenge, join the challenge!
2012
How did slashes become the standard path separators for URLs?
I’m going to take an educated guess and say it’s because of unix file system conventions. Early web servers mapped the URL to a path on disk inside the document root—this is still how most static sites work today.
[... 57 words]2010
Some questions about the “blocking” of HTML5
Some background reading. I was planning to fill in answers as they arrive, but I screwed up the moderation of the comments and got flooded with detailed responses—I strongly recommend reading the comments.
The Widening HTML5 Chasm. Simon St. Laurent’s commentary on the HTML5/Adobe situation. The most interesting piece I’ve read on it so far.
No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, "blocked" in the W3C HTML Working Group -- not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video -- not by me, not by Adobe. Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5. Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?
At this point all I could honestly tell you from the point of view of the editor of several of the HTML5 documents being held up is that the W3C have said they're won't publish without the objections being resolved, and that the objection is from Adobe. I can't even tell what I could do to resolve the objection. It seems to be entirely a process-based objection.
2009
An Unnofficial Q&A about the Discontinuation of the XHTML2 WG. By Henri Sivonen.
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone kept up to date on the progress of the various W3C working groups. They don't. There are a lot of people who asked what professional markup looked like and were told (right or wrong) that XHTML was the future. So they went ahead and learned XHTML, built their websites and chose watching a DVD or spending time with their kids over watching Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby do battle over Postel's Law. Now all of a sudden they're told XHTML is dead. Some wailing and gnashing of teeth is to be expected. What's needed is less "boy aren't I smarter than them" snideness, and more Hey, here's what's up.
FAQs about the future of XHTML. The XHTML 2 Working Group charter will not be renewed after 2009—as far as the W3C are concerned, XHTML5 is the future of XHTML.
2008
XHTML—myths and reality. Useful overview of XHTML from Tina Holmboe of the W3C’s XHTML Working Group, which suggests considering HTML 4.01 strict unless you need mixed namespaces for things like MathML. I’ve been storing this blog’s content as XHTML but serving as HTML for several years now.
querySelector and querySelectorAll. WebKit now supports the W3C Selectors API. Expect the various JavaScript libraries to add this as an optimisation to achieve massive speedups (Prototype are already working on it).
Cross-Site XMLHttpRequest (via) “Firefox 3 implements the W3C Access Control working draft, which gives you the ability to do XMLHttpRequests to other web sites”—you can mark a document as available for cross-domain requests using either an Access-Control HTTP header or an XML processing instruction.
2007
The future of web standards. Nice analysis from James Bennett, who suggests that successful open source projects (Linux, Python, Perl etc) could be used as the model for a more effective standards process, and points out that Ian Hickson is something of a BDFL for the WHAT-WG.
To get a better future, not only do we need a return to "the browser wars", we need to applaud and use the hell out of "non-standard" features until such time as there's a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow "bad" is to work against your own self-interest.
google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later.
The CSS working group is irrelevant. “Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML”.
Problems with XHTML content type.
The first question you should be asking is why you need XHTML—if you don’t have a specific reason (the need for XML parsers to be able to consume your pages) you’re much better off with HTML 4.01 for now, and HTML 5 in probably a year or so.
[... 245 words]W3C Relaunches HTML Activity (via) “XHTML has proved valuable in other markets” == XHTML on the public Web has failed. Long live HTML!
2006
Tim Berners-Lee: Reinventing HTML. “It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally.” W3C to work on HTML again.
2005
W3C Web APIs Working Group (via) A welcome addition.
2004
TBL on TLDs
Tim Berners Lee (how many TLA celebrities is that now?): New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. Read the whole thing—Tim blows the .xxx and .mobi proposals out of the water and takes a neat swipe at for-profit registrars in the process. Reading this, the main thing that struck me is how incredibly forward thinking TBL really is. People complain about the long duration of W3C processes and the futuristic nature of the semantic web but the W3C are trying to build technologies that will still be relevant ten or twenty years from now. When you consider the longevity of TCP/IP, this is a really smart strategy. It’s a shame so many people involved with the web have trouble thinking past the next few months.