
30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web [video] - ntarocco
https://web30.web.cern.ch/
======
jacquesm
The Balkanization of the WWW and the network effects that keep Google,
Facebook and Microsoft entrenched are going to make the web a lot less fun in
the coming years. I feel more and more like a lemon that will be squeezed
either way, and it doesn't matter much to me whether I get bitten by the dog
or by the cat. The other article on the HN home page hits quite hard at what
the web has become vs what it _could_ have become. Ever more closed protocols,
ever more walled gardens, and more and more dirty plays to attempt to take
over a portion of the remainder.

I am absolutely not sure what to do about any of this, it is almost as if
there is a mutual exclusionary principle between a free and open
communications network and the eventual success which will then doom that
network to become non-free and non-open. Very frustrating all this.

~~~
jcadam
> are going to make the web a lot less fun

 _are_ going to? It already has. I'm old enough to remember a time when the
web wasn't considered a synonym for the Internet, when USENET was actually
useful, gopher was a thing, and one could participate in online discourse
without constantly walking on eggshells. I want the early 90s Internet back.

~~~
jacquesm
Less fun than it is today. So even more less fun than it was some time ago...

~~~
kowdermeister
I experience the opposite. For me the web is 100x better than it was in 2001.

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SUr3na
Thank you and for existing dear world wide web and happy birthday,Although I
can't watch your birthday because my mere CPU can't handle the complexity of
this website.

Thank you for adopting The Greatest language:JavaScript .I hope to achieve a
certain level of fluency in Javascript that it becomes first language of my
children.

Thank you for helping us reinvent operating systems and name them web browsers
just to be able to render your standards and connect to you with our hearts,
over http of course.

Thank you for enabling communications and freedom all around the world .Now I
can ease my mind knowing that Google predicts when I die and would show
adequate coffin ads to my family weeks before the incident.

Happy birthday.

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electrotype
Internet, you're not as free, wild and fun as you were 20 years ago, but I
still love you.

~~~
kowdermeister
How it's less free? It's easier than ever to publish something for free with
knowledge that can be acquired for free and reach/collaborate with orders of
magnitude more people.

I remember digging through HomeSite 4.0 help file to learn what HTML tags do.

~~~
50656E6973
Surveillance everywhere, ads everywhere, automated armies of
trolls/bots/astroturfers, censorship on the rise

~~~
kowdermeister
I don't allow them to ruin any of my days :)

------
stesch
Yesterday I couldn’t read an ancient Greek text on Project Gutenberg because
I’m from Germany. Two days ago I couldn’t read an article on an US news site
because I’m from Europe. The “WW” in “WWW” is a joke.

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's down to the EU forcing that site to protect your privacy, which that US
site can't be bothered with. Nothing to do with the WWW as a technology.

Blame that US site and its advertisers for trying to harvest your data for
advertisers.

~~~
waffleguy
You can’t really blame anyone. A person doesn’t want to give away his/her
information, and site doesn’t want to give away its information for free. They
simply don’t see eye to eye.

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bibyte
Crazy to think it is only 30 years old. In just thirty years it has spread to
almost every corner of the world. The amount information stored in the web
right now is so large that I can't even imagine it. And it will only continue
to grow. I can't help but wonder what our world would look right now if it
hadn't been invented.

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ecmascript
30th anniversary of the open web and they send it on facebook :/

~~~
type0
Hey, at least we know what that is, could be worse if it was internet.org ...

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ChrisArchitect
Revisit a scene from the great Halt and Catch Fire tv show, where a meeting is
had that touches on a lot of points capturing the vibe and new world ahead
back then. (minus some actual show drama) So good.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3C3LBSPlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy3C3LBSPlk)

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okket
30 years and the WWW is about sending people to Facebook to watch a video :(

~~~
forinti
There are excellent texts and videos on math available now. I can go back to
the stuff I sort of learnt in school and college and really dig into it. Just
this week a learnt a couple of tricks in algebra I never heard of before.

My kids have this incredible tool I didn't have and they will have a better
education because of it.

So there's something for everyone.

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webjunkie
For everyone congratulating the Internet here, when it says World Wide Web in
the title, here is something to read:

[https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/whats-difference-internet-
web/](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/whats-difference-internet-web/)

------
bloopernova
I'm trying to think about how the web is different for a new user now vs 15
years ago.

I, as a consumer not an academic/student/employee, buy an internet access
account from my local monopoly highspeed internet provider. I'm set up with my
wifi router/modem and suddenly have a LAN that can connect to a huge variety
of sites via the web. Note that the web isn't in any way distinguished from
the internet. For most folks, the two have become synonymous.

I have 3 (imaginary) devices to use. A phone, a gaming console, and a PC. 2 of
those devices are already using a walled-garden app store, leaving only the PC
as something still sort of free. So I think there's a burden on Apple/Google,
and Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo to put measures in place to increase freedom and
decrease the negatives of the web.

Yet they don't control the main culprits of the problems that the web faces:
Twitter, Facebook, and I would add news sites comments, and Reddit, here.
Those web sites do have a huge responsibility for the problems that their
users have added to the web.

Their hands-off attitude allows bad actors to fester and grow, pulling people
in and further spreading their message to new sites. I don't see the problem
being tackled anytime soon though.

~~~
aembleton
At least Google's Android isn't a walled garden. You can just download and
install APKs from random websites.

~~~
bloopernova
True. Android is closer to the PC vs Apple's iPhone being closer to a Mac. Not
quite a perfect analogy, but it will be interesting to see how those 2
architecture decisions affect both platforms in 10 or 30 years time.

------
ArtWomb
One design aspect of the original WWW browser that I find interesting is how
all info regardless of source collapses to the same style. The absence of CSS
with all default block level content. Hyperlinks may be a sub-optimal way of
exploring a dense connected network of texts. But for academic paper sites
like Arxiv and OpenReview there seems to be a standard schema evolving: paper,
code, demo.

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Abishek_Muthian
My sincere appreciation to the CERN's management team which decided to release
'Web software, without royalties or other constraints'.

& to the visionary people from Network Working Group, whose technologies grew
the Network beyond the control of the Department of Defence (US); giving rise
to the Internet.

Google's coverage of WWW is nice[1], this is the first time I see right click
being blocked (for exhibit) on their site. There's no easy way to return from
the exhibit without using back as well.

[1]:[https://artsandculture.google.com/theme/eAJS4WcKh7UBIQ](https://artsandculture.google.com/theme/eAJS4WcKh7UBIQ)

~~~
aembleton
Just hold down Shift and you can use right click in Firefox.

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isostatic
Urgh. Two hours of Video and no summary. I wish I had two hours to watch it.

Here's an open letter about Tim's view on the dysfunction that affects the web
today.

[https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-
birthday-30/](https://webfoundation.org/2019/03/web-birthday-30/)

The BBC did an interview with him too

> after a good first 15 years, things had turned bad and a "mid-course
> correction" was needed.

He's optimistic such a correction will occur. I hope I'm that uncynical when
I'm his age.

~~~
icot
The first 30 minutes is an Introduction panel with the first 5 names in the
Featured Speakers section.

Then there's a 30 minutes interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, where among
other things he touches on Solid
([https://solid.mit.edu/](https://solid.mit.edu/)).

The last hour is a shared panel with the rest of the featured speakers on the
impact of the Web on Human Rights, surveillance, privacy, etc.

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jonnyscholes
Site took ages to load for me. For a moment I thought it was a clever
statement about the state of websites in 2019, before realising it's probably
being pounded with traffic.

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elitistphoenix
Could we update the link to the https site?

~~~
dang
Sure.

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TheLuddite
I hope it won't be around to see it's 40th Anniversary...

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adventist
Happy Birthday Internet!

~~~
rimliu
Being nitpicky: WWW is not the same as Internet.

~~~
OscarTheGrinch
Happy Birth-day little sub-domain... Happy Birthday to you!

~~~
ktpsns
Being nitpicky: The www. subdomain is not required at all ;D

~~~
isostatic
Indeed some browsers have decided to hide it from display completely, along
with other pesky things like protocol, path, query and anchor

~~~
Jaruzel
Google are already testing stuff in Chrome to remove the URI from the omnibox
completely.

~~~
isostatic
One of the many reasons I use firefox (with a separate search box)

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Levingstino
Happy Birthday internet, you gave us so much and there are many more crazy
adventures in front of us

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dave_sid
Yes hurrah for the internet! And I can’t wait until the next 30 years when we
get to witness the birth of even more tedious crypto currencies with wackier
names, I get to stress about my kids seeing Momo, and Facebook start tracking
my bowel movements to know when I should next see a Domino’s ad.

Thanks Tim! (HTTP 417)

~~~
nf05papsjfVbc
I hope you are being sarcastic.

While there are reasons to complain about the current state of the internet,
it _is_ an achievement of mankind which has transformed the world in many
ways.

~~~
dave_sid
Did you get the HTTP status code joke at the end? I was rather proud of that!

