
WorldWideWeb - aaronbrethorst
https://adactio.com/journal/14821
======
Accacin
Something that I couldn't find much information on.. How exactly did the
editing work? Could I edit a file and then once I'd saved the changes whoever
went to the file next would also see my edits?

How did this all work? For me, this is absolutely fascinating and I guess in
some ways this reminds me of modern wiki software (especially something like
vimwiki that I use daily).

If anyone has some 'technical' resources about how this browser worked, I'd
love to read it.

~~~
bonaldi
You can literally try it (and read about it) in the emulator itself!

~~~
Sendotsh
No they can't, it got hugged to death and has been down since.

> Service Unavailable

> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance
> downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Plus the demo videos don't work on Firefox in Windows 10, and there's no
screenshots or any other form of seeing the demo.

~~~
shakna
Here's a screenshot [0].

It appears one of the links in the article is wrong.

The correct link is:
[https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser](https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser)

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/E9aTHJz.png](https://i.imgur.com/E9aTHJz.png)

~~~
Sendotsh
Thanks for the screenshot. The browser itself still 503s.

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jancsika
> Launch WorldWideWeb

Just kept loading and didn't ever deliver the thing I was waiting to see.

Yep, definitely makes me nostalgic for the early web.

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zeta0134
I was able to get it to load after a few tries, and I'm pleasantly surprised
at how well it handles the formatting of some of my sites. It seems to do okay
with text, though it doesn't seem to support images or form elements; I
haven't been able to attempt a login.

For those of you having trouble getting it to load while it's being hugged to
death, I took a properly meta screenshot:

[https://rusticnes.reploid.cafe/nexus_hacker_news.png](https://rusticnes.reploid.cafe/nexus_hacker_news.png)

------
remysharp
I've put a working copy up on
[https://www.isthe.link/browser/](https://www.isthe.link/browser/) (I worked
on the JavaScript that replicates the browser).

We're (the team) are waiting to hear from the Ops folk at CERN to get the
server to stop 503'ing. Until then, you can try it out above.

~~~
remysharp
The source code will be available too once we get the go ahead.

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return0
i suppose this is a simulation of the WorldWideWeb browser... i think in very
old times you could find this in some linux distros along with another browser
with an italian sounding name. i think u can find screenshots in google

wikipedia has it
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:World...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:WorldWideWeb_FSF_GNU.png)

~~~
tdeck
> along with another browser with an italian sounding name

Maybe ViolaWWW [1]? That browser invented (it's own) stylesheets [2] and
scripting language [3] years before JavaScript and CSS:

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW?wprov=sfla1)

[2]:
[http://viola.org/viola/styles/HTML_sodium.stg](http://viola.org/viola/styles/HTML_sodium.stg)

[3]:
[http://viola.org/viola/vw/inset_talk.v](http://viola.org/viola/vw/inset_talk.v)

~~~
arethuza
Viola was the very first web browser I used in late '92 on an HP workstation.

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smacktoward
When did links go from "double click to follow" to "single click to follow"?

~~~
HillRat
That was an evolutionary dead end that didn’t persist; since every other
browser that followed focused on retrieval and display, not editing, they
didn’t need to distinguish between “follow this link” and “open this link for
editing.” (To be fair, given the lessons of SGML, there wasn’t any reason to
think folks would just open up vi or emacs and start editing markup, so they
get a pass on the UX for that one.)

------
nickthemagicman
I feel like the beauty and elegance of the original web was the fact that it
was just an xml parser linking information.

Now JavaScript is required for everything and we can't get back to that
original elegant concept.

~~~
krapp
Javascript isn't required for everything, and nothing is stopping anyone from
writing simple, static sites without it.

The web was always envisioned to have potential beyond just static hyperlinked
documents. The belief that everything beyond basic HTML has been a corruption
of an ideal rather than evolution is a confabulated view of history, brought
on mostly by nostalgia and a frustrated sense of elitism now that the web is
as mainstream as any other form of mass media.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Pure static sites are extremely rare.

I dont have an issue with pushing beyond pure html. But js doesn't build on
that concept of xml and work along side of it. JS destroys that concept and
replaces it with something unique on every site.

I think web assembly is a step in the right direction and the sooner we drop
js the better.

~~~
krapp
I don't think that's entirely fair. Javascript's original intent was to allow
scripting the DOM and adding interactivity to the document, which could be
considered working alongside it.

I would agree that the scale of its use has been taken too far, but that seems
more a complaint about implementation and developer culture than the language
itself. Even without Javascript, the design of every site is still potentially
unique.

And isn't web assembly a further step in the same direction?

~~~
nickthemagicman
I don't think allowing scripting of the DOM was a great idea personally. The
goal of the original web was layout and structure of information and the links
between them.

Javascript bulldozes over both the DOM and URL's.

The nice thing about web assembly from what I've read, is that it doesn't
allow access to the DOM. It basically creates its own sandbox that is then
included on the page.

You can INCLUDE interactivity in the page, but, you can't overwrite the page
itself.

Because of this it kind of encourages a progressive web design style. You will
design the html/xml first then you will wrap the interactivity within.

This will encourage a separation of concerns between highly interactive, more
complicated code, and layout and structuring of documents.

There will be some issues to be overcome and I doubt it will be as ideallyic
as I imagine, but I think overall it would be a more sane web being able to
select 'disable javascript' without any worries.

Just my 2 cents.

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kfwhp
What is this, a simulation of a 503 error?

~~~
blaze33
Have you tried connecting with a dial-up modem from 1989?

~~~
gnufx
High speed X.25 to CERN, surely.

