Ten year anniversary

This site has now been online for a decade. In Internet time, that’s roughly somewhere between the invention of fire and the fall of the Roman Empire.

Back in 1994, things were simpler. I wrote plain HTML by hand in Emacs on a Solaris machine and viewed the results in Mosaic. No frameworks. No content management system. No JavaScript dependency tree containing the collected works of Western civilization. You typed some tags, reloaded the page and hoped you hadn’t forgotten to close something.

Later that year, the first public beta of Netscape arrived and suddenly the web started looking like it might become something more than an obscure playground for academics, geeks and people with suspiciously strong opinions about Unix.

Microsoft took a little longer to notice the party. Internet Explorer 1.0 arrived in August 1995, built on the remains of Spyglass Mosaic. Then came the browser wars: three years of incompatible features, proprietary tags and developers discovering exciting new ways to make the same page look completely different on two computers.

Microsoft eventually won, because Microsoft. By the turn of the millennium, Internet Explorer sat on the throne, victorious and largely uncontested. What could possibly go wrong?

Advertising for Martians.

Those early years were the Wild West of the web. There were few rules, fewer standards and plenty of blinking text, tiled backgrounds and websites proudly announcing that they were “Best viewed in Internet Explorer”.

Then during the first years of the new millennium, a few pioneers began preaching strange and dangerous ideas about web standards, semantic markup and accessibility. Websites should perhaps work regardless of which browser happened to be interpreting them, they suggested. Radical stuff, I know.

What began as a small collection of stubborn idealists has since grown into something resembling a crusade against tag soup, browser-specific hacks and websites held together with nested tables, transparent GIFs and prayer.

Progress, apparently. So what will the next decade bring? I have absolutely no idea. Which is probably the best reason to stick around and find out.