from Hacker News

30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web [video]

by ntarocco on 3/12/19, 7:27 AM with 75 comments

• by jacquesm on 3/12/19, 9:55 AM

  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.

• by SUr3na on 3/12/19, 10:12 AM

  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.

• by electrotype on 3/12/19, 8:35 AM

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

• by stesch on 3/12/19, 9:38 AM

  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.

• by bibyte on 3/12/19, 9:00 AM

  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.

• by ecmascript on 3/12/19, 10:17 AM

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

• by ChrisArchitect on 3/12/19, 3:54 PM

  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

• by okket on 3/12/19, 10:52 AM

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

• by webjunkie on 3/12/19, 9:51 AM

  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/

• by bloopernova on 3/12/19, 1:24 PM

  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.

• by ArtWomb on 3/12/19, 12:12 PM

  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.

• by Abishek_Muthian on 3/12/19, 11:42 AM

  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

• by isostatic on 3/12/19, 9:49 AM

  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/

  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.

• by jonnyscholes on 3/12/19, 8:48 AM

  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.

• by elitistphoenix on 3/12/19, 8:21 AM

  Could we update the link to the https site?

• by TheLuddite on 3/12/19, 10:12 AM

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

• by adventist on 3/12/19, 8:36 AM

  Happy Birthday Internet!

• by Levingstino on 3/12/19, 9:08 AM

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

• by dave_sid on 3/12/19, 9:44 AM

  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)