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1876
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates the telephone. The first busy signal
follows soon after.
WHY WE MENTIONED THESE THINGS
The events we just mentioned set the stage for the Internet and thus eventually for the Web. Gutenberg’s invention sets in motion the concept that information belongs to the people (at least, to those people with a few coins in the pockets of their funny fifteenth-century pants). The subsequent technological breakthroughs make possible the eventual sharing of data via telephone lines.
1945
Vannevar Bush, Science Advisor to U.S. President Roosevelt, proposes a “conceptual machine” that can store vast amounts of information linked by user-created associations. He calls these user-generated connections “trails and associations.” Eventually they’ll be called “hyperlinks.” (As We May Think, www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/ computer/bushf.htm).
1962
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) is established, which will eventually be known as the Internet. Dr. J.C.R. Licklider is assigned to lead ARPA’s research into the military application of computer technology.
1965
Scientist Ted Nelson coins the word hypertext to describe
“nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choice
to the reader, best read at an interactive screen.” (See http:// www.acclarke.co.uk/1960-1969.html and http://ei.cs.vt.edu/ ~wwwbtb/book/chap1/htx_hist.html for more information.)
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Nelson dreams of a worldwide library of all human knowledge that can be read on a screen and based on links. Sound familiar? Nelson also dreams of micropayment-based royalty schemes, two-way links, and other features not found in the Web as we know it.
1966
ARPA scientist Robert Taylor, no doubt depressed when women find out he is not the movie star Robert Taylor, figures out a way for researchers at various locations to collaborate by means of electronic computer networks. Inexpensive terminals are linked to a few pricey mainframe computers. Scientists begin exchanging documents and email messages. The first public demonstration of what is now being called ARPANET will take place in 1972. The Internet is born.
1978
On January 3, Steve Jobs and friend, Woz, take Apple Computer public, thus launching the personal computer “revolution.” As Gutenberg’s invention brought human knowledge out of the monastery and into the hands of ordinary citizens, Jobs and Woz’s invention takes the arcane business of data crunching out of the realm of Big Science and makes it available to folks like us. The subsequent Macintosh computer (1984) offers a Graphical User Interface (GUI), making it easier still for ordinary people to use a computer. The Graphical User Interface, based on work done in Xerox Parc in the 1970s, enables people to perform tasks by clicking onscreen icons and buttons. Most civilians find this easier than memorizing and typing cryptic commands. A Windows GUI follows in the PC realm. The point-and- click interface will be key to the eventual acceptance of the Web.
1981
The domain name server (DNS) is developed, thus making the future safe for web addresses (www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0799.txt). At first these will have cryptic numerical “names” such as 191.37.4211, but eventually consumer-friendly domain names such as brandname.com will take their place. This is key because advertisers would see little value in adding
“Visit us at 191.37.4211” to the end of their radio commercials but are
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perfectly happy asking us to visit brandname.com. When advertisers are happy, they spend money. When money is available, professionals arise to claim it. The rise of web design and development is thus partially made possible by the invention of consumer-friendly domain names.
1984
The Apple Macintosh ushers in an era of “desktop publishing,” empowering designers to set their own type and place and color-correct their own images, rather than relying on the skills of third-party service professionals. Desktop publishing also empowers ordinary citizens to express themselves creatively, sometimes (though not always) with wonderful results. This too will be mirrored a decade later, when the Web empowers anyone with a computer and the willingness to learn HTML to become a “web designer.”
As if all that was not enough, Apple makes use of Ted Nelson’s hypertex concept in its HyperCard product, which enables creative folks to create link-based presentations.
1986
There are now 5,000 Internet hosts (computers connected to the Internet
“backbone”) and 241 newsgroups.
On the campaign trail, Al Gore makes frequent reference to the developing
“Information Superhighway.” The phrase actually refers to high-speed coaxial networks, but it is popularly understood to mean ARPANET or the Internet. Press confusion on the subject will later haunt Gore’s 2000 bid for the U.S. presidency.
1988
The NSFNET backbone is upgraded to T1 (1.544 Mbps). We’re not sure what this means either, except that stuff gets a lot faster.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is developed in Israel, thus paving the way for a future where office workers can complain about their jobs to friends in foreign lands, instead of simply boring their spouses with these petty grievances.
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1989
Tim Bray and others cofound Open Text, an Internet search engine. Search engines cut through the chaos of the burgeoning Internet by enabling citizens to actually find things. This ability to find things brings value to the Net and will be an invaluable aspect of the coming Web. Search engines will eventually enable citizens to find half-price airline tickets or seek out information to help their children write school reports. The human and commercial potential built into that premise will empower the coming
“revolution” of faster and faster networks, and larger and larger web agencies such as Scient, iXL, and Razorfish.
CERN is the biggest Internet site (location) in Europe. Working there is a young scientist, Tim Berners-Lee.
1990
On the twelfth of November at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee (with R.
Cailliau) invents the World Wide Web, rooting the idea in hypertext:
“HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will… A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser… World Wide Web (or W3) intends to cater for these services across the HEP [High Energy Physics] community.” (See http://www.w3.org/Proposal.)
Not content with the profundity of this invention, Berners-Lee also develops a “web browser” on his NeXT machine. With Berners-Lee’s browser, not only can you view web pages, you can also edit and design them. Fortunately, the “designing” part of the browser does not make it far out of Berners-Lee’s lab, and thus the way is paved for professional designers and art directors, rather than scientists, to create the visual language of the Web. (The original CERN W3 package included a server, a browser, and a true WYSIWYG editor.)
1991
America Online (AOL) begins offering Internet access in addition to its proprietary content and newsgroup features. Millions of people begin “going online” thanks to AOL’s easy-to-use point-and-click functionality and con- sumer-friendly brand imagery. This is important because if the Internet had
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remained the province of geeks, the Web would not have gained such ready acceptance, let alone exploded into public consciousness. You would not be thinking about a career in web design, and this book would be all about delicious low-fat recipes rather than the Web.
1993
January: Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, young programmers working for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) invent a point-and-click graphical browser for the Web, designed to run on UNIX machines. It is called Mosaic because the name Pantaloons didn’t do as well in testing. (Just kidding. Not kidding about Mosaic, they did indeed call it that. Just kidding about why they called it that because we frankly don’t know and this paragraph felt a little “short” to us.)
August: Andreessen and his co-workers release free versions of Mosaic for Macintosh and Windows PCs.
December: Andreessen quits his day job.
There are two million Internet hosts and 600 websites.
The NCSA “What’s New” page (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/ Docs/whats-new.html) is both an early non-commercial web directory and one of the first weblogs. A weblog is a frequently updated, annotated directory of stuff on the Web. In 1998, weblogs (always quietly present) would “catch on” again thanks to sites such as Scripting News (scripting.com), Robot Wisdom (www.robotwisdom.com), and Memepool (www.memepool.com). By 1999 they would become downright trendy, as hundreds of web designers create personal weblogs to keep their friends abreast of the sites they like, while thousands of first-time web publishers use tools such as Blogger, Manila, and Pitas to produce their own personal
“Blogs.”
1994
Marc Andreessen hooks up with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. The two form a company called Mosaic Communications Corporation to promote their Netscape web browser. NCSA, holders of the Mosaic trademark, balk at this use of their trademark, eventually prompting the young browser company to rename itself Netscape Communications.
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Two graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, form Yahoo! (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle), a directory whose purpose is to keep track of the websites springing up everywhere (www.yahoo.com). The site is organized somewhat like a library’s card catalog system. Other directories of lesser quality quickly spring up in imitation.
Wired Magazine’s Hotwired site evangelizes the new medium and pioneers techniques of web design and web architecture.
Tim Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international non-profit think tank dedicated to providing a rational roadmap for the technological advancement of the Web.
People begin designing and producing personal sites because they can.
“Justin’s Links from the Underground” (www.links.com) is one of the first and most famous personal sites. Glenn Davis launches Cool Site of the Day (www.coolsiteoftheday.com) to keep track of interesting or funky content on the rapidly growing Web.
1995
Pushed into public consciousness and acceptance by the coolness of Netscape’s Navigator graphical browser and by sites such as Cool Site of the Day, the Web mushrooms. There are now 6.5 million hosts and 100,000 websites.
The Web functions well, but its design potential is sadly underdeveloped. David Siegel, a typographer and early web designer, publishes “Web Wonk” (www.dsiegel.com/tips/), an online tutorial offering techniques with which designers can create pleasing, magazine-like page layouts on the Web by working around (hacking) the limitations of HTML—the language with which web pages are created. These techniques seriously conflict with the purpose of HTML as a simple, structured language for sharing documents. But they are all designers have to work with at this time. The rift between the W3C and graphic designers has begun. (In 1996, Siegel publishes the book, Creating Killer Websites. Though far from the first how-to guide, it will be one of the first books to treat web design as a serious issue.)
Netscape introduces the tiled background image in Navigator 1.1. Warner Brothers’ “Batman Forever” site is among the first to make intelligent use of the feature, hacking it to create the illusion of full-screen images.
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Batmanforever.com helps prove that the Web has tremendous potential for anyone wishing to promote an idea, event, or product. There are three million web users, and half of them—1.5 million people—view this one site every week.
Jakob Nielsen, a Ph.D. from Sun Microsystems, begins publishing articles (www.useit.com) calling for a rational approach to the development of the Web. Nielsen calls his approach “usability” and claims that it is based on scientific studies. The rift between designers and usability experts has begun.
Personal home pages are proliferating.
Yahoo! and other large sites begin running ad banners.
Netscape goes public.
1996
David Siegel creates “High Five” to honor and showcase the best-designed sites on the Web. (High Five is no longer active, but archives are available at highfivearchive.com/core/index.html.) He bestows the first High Five award on his own site. Some consider the gesture arrogant, but Siegel doesn’t care; his book is selling like crack. And, to some extent because of his evangelism, the Web begins attracting greater numbers of design professionals and becoming better and better designed as a result. But this aesthetic boon comes at a cost. Because most of us are using hacks and workarounds to make our sites more attractive and readable, few of us are demanding the creation of robust standards that would provide better presentational capabilities without breaking the Web’s structural underpinnings. And since we’re not hollering for better standards, the W3C isn’t rushing them out the door, and browser makers aren’t hastening to support them. We will all pay for this later.
“Suck” (suck.com), a brilliantly written daily site created by Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman, offers sardonic commentary along with a radically flattened hierarchy. Instead of offering a splash page, followed by a contents page, followed by sectional header pages, and so on (the tedious architecture found in most early sites), Suck slaps its content on the front page
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where you can’t miss it. Minds reel. The rift between web architects and graphic designers begins. (Architects think about streamlining and controlling the flow of the user’s experience. Graphic designers think about reinventing the interface and blowing the user away on every page. Good web designers struggle to find a balance between these two approaches on a site-by-site basis.)
Anuff and Steadman will later sell their creation to their employers for more than lunch money, thus ushering in a period where “content is king,” whether it’s actually valuable or even read, and where everybody and her sister wants to be a millionaire. This is not Anuff or Steadman’s fault.
Word.com begins offering intricately designed, well-written content. Like Suck, Word.com will be purchased later, with mixed results. One mass delusion (“content is dead”) will briefly replace another (“we all get to be millionaires”).
Netscape introduces JavaScript, a “simple” programming language that enables web pages to become far more interactive. Web designers begin stealing JavaScript from each other.
Netscape and Sun announce that Sun’s new object-oriented Java language will “free” everyone from the “tyranny” of Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Bill Gates smells the coffee. Microsoft creates Internet Explorer. The browser wars begin. Over the next four years, Netscape will invent one way of doing things while Microsoft invents another. Web designers will be forced to choose which technologies to support—or will support multiple technologies at considerable cost to their clients. Eventually, most everyone will realize that the medium can only advance with full support for common standards.
There are 12.8 million hosts and half a million websites.
1997
Amazon.com begins selling books over the Web. Marketers everywhere wake up to the promise of e-commerce and begin scrambling to launch e- commerce companies, add e-commerce capabilities to the offerings of their existing companies, or just put the letter “e” in front of whatever it is that they do. There are e-books, e-investments, e-architects, and e-com- munities. E-nough, already. A brief i-period will follow the e-period.
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Internet Explorer 3.0 begins to support Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), an advanced yet simple-to-use design technology created by the W3C. Netscape Navigator 3.0 does not support CSS but does offer JavaScript (and JavaScript Style Sheets—a competing technology that nobody ever adopts). IE3 does not fully support JavaScript. The browser wars escalate, and the Web becomes still more fragmented.
There are now 19.5 million hosts, one million websites, and 71,618 newsgroups.
1998
There are over 300 million pages on the Web—and 1.5 million new ones appear online daily.
Internet traffic doubles every 100 days.
Investors become frenzied. Venture capitalists become stupidly wealthy. Anyone in a suit can raise $5 million by promising to sell anything to anybody. If we exaggerate, it’s because this is a period of deep delusional dementia fueled by 80s style greed and 90s style buzzwords. Baby Jesus weeps.
The growth of e-commerce exceeds its one-year expectation by more than 10,000 percent. The projected growth of business-to-business services on the Web dwarfs even the growth of e-commerce.
With much money at stake, the browser war’s fragmentation of the Web becomes intolerable. Developers spend at least 25 percent of their time working around incompatibilities between Netscape and Microsoft browsers.
A group of designers, developers, and writers, lead by Glenn Davis and George Olsen, forms The Web Standards Project (WaSP) at www.webstandards.org. The group hopes to persuade browser makers to support common standards so the Web can evolve rationally. The W3C, which creates most of the standards, lacks police power to enforce them; in W3C parlance, things such as CSS and HTML 4 are “recommendations.” The WaSP sees these recommendations as an absolute necessity and will spend the next three years spreading that gospel by any means necessary.