
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - lelf
https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/
======
pavlov
It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years.
Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the
NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards.

2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have
high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for
vector graphics.

Text labels on menus and buttons is such an improvement over the
undecipherable "flat school" icons that are currently used everywhere.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Yeah I would love to see a modern Fluxbox. My only issue with Fluxbox on
Ubuntu and similar is other DE's seem to have better visual support for
wireless. I have no way of connecting to the internet if I can't even see the
Wi-Fi icon anywhere. I don't want to have to install components from another
DE. Also they seem to mostly be abandoned. I have the same issue with tiling
WM's. I don't want to have to configure my DE / VM it should just work, what I
should configure is preferential settings not functional settings.

~~~
afj3lmb8zs
>connecting to the internet if I can't even see the Wi-Fi icon

I usually just run nmtui in a terminal.

~~~
komali2
Right, but you get the idea yea? If you sat me down at the machine ten seconds
ago and said "turn on the WiFi," would "run a command in terminal that doesn't
have the words network, wifi, or internet in it" really be at the top of the
list of things I'd try?

Edit: oh, that's some sort of ui opening command?

~~~
megous
That's not the point of these fringe desktop environments.

If you sat someone in front of custom configured i3wm, they would not have a
clue how to do anything, really. The point is that the owner can have a nice
customized and highly effective experience of using a computer.

There's a way to configure wifi easily without an icon, with some text based
menus and nmtui is one way to do it if you use NetworkManager. You don't need
an icon/GUI. Also there's nm-applet, so you can have a tray icon and GUI even
in these DEs.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>they would not have a clue how to do anything, really //

Ha, used a little MacBook for essentially the first time 2 days ago, it was
being used to present a slideshow (MS Powerpoint). I tried to advance beyond
the end of the slide stack and it closed to the editor [terrible UX for me,
IMO it should blank the screen and show a message on the laptop; maybe that's
the default, wasn't my machine obvs], I was completely lost trying to scroll
the slide chooser (left pane) as there was no scroll bar, and no pgup/pgdn
keys, click-scroll [which works in other UI that I use] was rearranging the
slides instead of scrolling. It's so easy to get lost in unfamiliar UI.

We can easily adapt if we want to, however.

------
fareesh
There is some kind of easter egg when you click the white circle in the footer
it opens this image
[https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/images/wow.jpg](https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/images/wow.jpg)

Some meme I don't know about?

~~~
mxuribe
That is a photo of Jeremy Keith [[https://adactio.com](https://adactio.com)]
who was part of the team involved in this effort:
[https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/colophon/](https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/colophon/)

------
The_Androctonus
The actual HTTP requests this browser makes seem to be going through a proxy
somewhere which I'm guessing renders the page on the server using this legacy
look and returns it to be displayed. I thought it was using ajax to load pages
directly from whatever URL I typed.

I'm surprised this had no support for the <ol> tag because numbered lists
aren't rendering.

\--

Edit: yeah I just noticed how all the links on every page have the domain part
changed to worldwideweb.cern.ch.

But damn I can't help but remember Newton's "If I have seen further, it is by
standing on the shoulders of giants." Tim BL did not invent URIs, TCP/IP,
domain names, or hypertext. He simply figured out a brilliant way to combine
all these things together. Satoshi Nakamoto did not invent hashing, proof-of-
work, signatures, or any of the other cryptographic protocols that make
Bitcoin possible. Likewise, he simply put all these different ideas together
in a brilliant way.

------
MalcolmPF
Awesome. And Hacker News holds up pretty well!

[https://imgur.com/a/KWl3iUp](https://imgur.com/a/KWl3iUp)

------
jack_jennings
A bit more information about the typeface created for this project, which is
open source: [https://github.com/djrrb/CERN-www-
fonts/blob/master/README.m...](https://github.com/djrrb/CERN-www-
fonts/blob/master/README.md)

(The type world being a small one, this design had assistance from David
Jonathan Ross, the designer of the Input coding typeface)

~~~
The_Androctonus
Your link leads to a 404.

------
willemojnr
Wow, the internet was fast back then.

~~~
sscarduzio
I wonder how slow the actual one was

~~~
krapp
Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back
then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how
much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of
broadband versus dialup.

~~~
kgwgk
Ironically? I assumed your grand-parent was joking. A top-end PC in 1990 was a
33MHz i486 with 4Mb of RAM and a 9600 bit/s modem.

~~~
krapp
"Ironic" in that a lot of people here complain about how slow the modern web
is versus the simpler purely static web of the past, when the modern web even
with all the javascript BS is qualitatively faster.

------
Yhippa
I remember using newsgroups back in college. Unbelievable that we have open
protocols for that type of stuff but everything seems to be trending to
sovereign news sites.

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bovermyer
Holy crap, my website actually looks decent in this...

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mattmoose21
It took me a minute to figure out that I needed to properly type in the URL of
a website.

~~~
netsharc
Funny how for a while (back in the days) URLs in the offline world had
"[http://"](http://") before the "www", when (IMO) "www" and ".com" at the end
would have been enough to tell people that it's a website URL, and modern
browsers of the day were clever enough anyway to be able to load URLs entered
without the protocol. Tragically nowadays marketers have replaced the URL with
(facebook logo)/(their page URL on Facebook), or just "Search for $keyword",
knowing they've done enough SEO work (or paid Google/Bing enough?) to make
that $keyword the 1st search/ad result.

Which returns full circle to "AOL keywords"...

------
0xbadc0de5
Good to see they fixed the remote code execution exploit identified by:
[https://github.com/jtang613/dcq2018_www](https://github.com/jtang613/dcq2018_www)

------
doener
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19206433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19206433)

------
sscarduzio
Really cool! The illusion broke when emoji could be rendered correctly, I
think the original interface could not even render basic utf8.

~~~
pault
I could be wrong but I remember a point in my career where using utf8 for HTML
documents was a new and shiny thing.

------
chelmzy
Curious if they have this server segregated from the rest of the network or
you can browse other internal resources through it.

------
drbytes
surf the web with ip 188.184.108.149, ISP CERN - European Organization for
Nuclear Research.. :s

~~~
komali2
"why is Google in German?" Was my first thought

