_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989 (2019)
jbottoms wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
Probably should be "Rebuilt the CERN Browser"
The Silversmith browser went into service in 1986. It worked with SCI
documents under security controls. The user could only access the
sections of the document permitted by heir clearance. It includeded
in-line images that linked to descriptions providing access to data in
a prescribed linked bounding box. The Security mechanism could be
configured to resemble the security procedures of WWMCCS (Now
SIPRNet)(WorldWide Military Command & Control System), Later renamed
WIS (WWMCCS Information System).
A modified version providing semantic sezrches was made available to
the U.S.Army Material Command in 1988.
In 2007 an ACM in Boston a paper described another variant that
provided searches using creative strings.
dang wrote 17 hours 10 min ago:
Related. Others?
WorldWideWeb â the first web browser - [1] - Jan 2023 (18 comments)
The Browser â WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) - [2] - April 2021
(21 comments)
The Browser â WorldWideWeb Next Application - [3] - Nov 2020 (8
comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - [4] - Oct 2020 (7 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - [5] - Feb 2019 (45 comments)
CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT
web browser - [6] - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839
HTML [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103
HTML [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929
HTML [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
HTML [6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316
morphle wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
You can't fix a broken wheel. Let the downvotes illustrating the
ignorance of HN pop culture start....
This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser as a web page, tries
to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel.
The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel.
Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: [1] Some of
the comments of youtube are fun too.
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer
science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they
programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after
Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal
computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's
broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web.
Two demos says it all: [2] [3] Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it
completely:
Early Croquet demo (there are several others): [4] Croquet in
webbrowser: [5] Demo of webbrowser replacement: [6] Squeak and all its
predecessors: [7] Etoys:
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961
HTML [2]: https://youtu.be/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147
HTML [3]: https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234
HTML [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZO7av2ZFB8
HTML [5]: https://codefrau.github.io/jasmine/
HTML [6]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9ldlqhVkM
HTML [7]: https://smalltalkzoo.computerhistory.org
HTML [8]: https://squeak.js.org/etoys/
cxr wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
> The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the
web.
The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a
machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works
Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and
it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).
The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that
everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an
SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted
it to beâincluding people like Alan Kayâwho then perversely go on
to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.
It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the
industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without
Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.
karanveer wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
i want to meet those people who did this originally in 1989 and to ask
them, did they ever think it would be this today?
dboreham wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
It wasn't a rocket science amazing idea in 1989. It was a pretty
obvious thing anyone in the space could see would be interesting to
try -- hypertext already existed. The internet was just taking off.
The idea that you could host pages that hyperlinked to each other on
the internet was totally obvious and if you'd explained it to anyone
active in the internet at the time (obviously not that many of those
people), they'd have nodded. I should add that almost nobody had a
computer with a graphics display in 1989 (I did, at work) so that
further constrains the set of folk to whom the idea would make sense.
The fact that everyone now has many 64-bit computers with extremely
high resolution displays is probably the more surprising thing to
1989-dude.
embedding-shape wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
The original WWW proposal is quite easy and interesting to read
through: [1] Part of the original requirements was the decentralized
nature, which I always found extra interesting:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start
small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system
must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring
any central control or coordination.
Doesn't directly answer your question I suppose, but gives at least
one perspective on how at least one person saw it at that point :)
HTML [1]: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
amelius wrote 1 day ago:
I wish someone would write a reference implementation in a functional
language.
At least that would formalize the specification.
fecal_henge wrote 1 day ago:
No link to EDH.
sylware wrote 1 day ago:
That makes me think about the whatng cartel apocalypse.
People lost themselves, forgetting how important noscript/basic (x)html
(aka basic HTML forms, nowdays which could be augmented with and ))
has been for web technical independence.
All that is very sad, and toxic.
ulrischa wrote 1 day ago:
When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The
scrollbar left, the triple steped menu...
What was improved sometimes is only visible when we see how it was back
in the past.
alansaber wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
It has a certain charm, like everything engineered without immediate
commercial considerations
WillAdams wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
Menus can be torn off and positioned as desired.
I miss that.
Jaxan wrote 1 day ago:
The deeply nested menu for entering the url, thatâs bad, I agree.
But why is a scrollbar on the other side better or worse?
I have the minimap configured on the left in vs code and use it as
scrollbar. Itâs quite nice actually.
gapan wrote 1 day ago:
> The deeply nested menu for entering the url, thatâs bad, I
agree.
I'm not saying it is perfect, but it was not that bad, really. It's
only one level down. And then you could also use a keyboard
shortcut for it, which is always faster than anything mouse-driven
if your hands are on the keyboard, which they would be, if you
wanted to type a URL.
And even if you had to use the mouse, there is an interface feature
we have lost: tear-off menus. If you found that you needed
something in a nested menu often, you could simply tear-off that
submenu and pin it on your desktop so you can always have direct
access.
gapan wrote 1 day ago:
> When watching this I'm shocked how bad the UX Was these days. The
scrollbar left, the triple steped menu...
Perhaps the only thing "bad" about it is that you're simply not used
to it. I can certainly think of someone used to that UI thinking the
same thing about today's interfaces, with disappearing scrollbars,
flat design and confusing icons.
j3th9n wrote 1 day ago:
Links where called Pointers back then apparently.
shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
Better than chrome!
Rapzid wrote 1 day ago:
It's a real shame both Job's movies skip right over his NeXT and Pixar
days..
In 1983 he predicted 10-15 years until home network connectivity is
"solved". 10 years later the world wide web released to the public,
originally developed on his company's NeXT platform in 1989..
nebula8804 wrote 1 day ago:
The 2015 movie has the entire second act dedicated to the Next launch
no?
twoodfin wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
Indeed, to the exclusion of the iPod or iPhone launches.
And it gets the core idea right, too, that NeXT was a commercial
failure but built the core OS technology launchpad for the mobile
revolutionâafter saving Apple, of course.
Itâs told in a wildly ahistorical framing, but I find the stage
play-like âyour life passes before your eyesâ structure to be
much truer to Jobsâ storyâand more entertainingâthan the
Isaacson book.
One of my favorite films of the last 20 years.
keepamovin wrote 1 day ago:
I love what the CERN team did here visually with the NeXT UI.
Rebuilding a historical browser inside a modern one is a fun rabbit
hole, but man, it is the same technical wall to hit every time:
iframes.
You build this beautiful retro UI, you wire up the address bar, and
then you try to load a modern site and just hit a wall of CORS,
X-Frame-Options, and CSP blocks. Which, tho is probably precisely
things should work. Otherwise people arbitrarily iframe the open web
opening up a massive clickjacking-pocalypse. It makes total sense for
security....sigh.
But I sitll wanted a way to get around it to capture that 90s nostalgia
(tho NeXT and this browser were actually from the late 80s), the real
open web inside a retro recreation not just a crippled, iframe-blocked
imitation. Or "everything links to archive org" stuff.
To make that work, I had to make a custom embedder API. It basically
pipes a fully isolated remote Chromium instance right into the retro
shell through an iframe in a custom element. The engine is real, and it
respects the native security boundaries because the browser is
physically isolated, but it wears that heavy 90s UI so you get the 90s
feel.
If you want to mess around with a different flavor of 90s nostalgia
that can actually surf the modern web, I put up a live version here:
[1] . Sound on for the retro modem dial-up elevator music. The
non-graybeards may never have experienced the modem's mating call in
the wild.
HTML [1]: https://win9-5.com/demo
mistrial9 wrote 1 day ago:
network users at that time already had software for ftp and other
common tools. Gopher sort of linked logically to an ftp idea. Mosaic
was often introduced in the same sentence as "uses a format called
HTML" .. Mosaic seemed interesting but also it was obvious that pages
in that format would have to become popular, to make more of them.
There wasn't a big reason to switch your daily software to Mosaic since
stable apps were better for their existing uses. It was a very rare
thing to have access to a NeXT machine (maybe not on YNews).
From my point of view it was Netscape that made a big splash, a year+
later, with a lot of publicity and good graphic design. Mosaic itself
was an awkward demo with an interesting nerdy story.
jibal wrote 1 day ago:
> The WWW project does not take responsability
I guess that let them off the hook for incorrect spelling. :-)
ChrisArchitect wrote 1 day ago:
(2019)
Some previous discussions:
2023 [1] 2021 [2] 2020 [3] 2019
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34218591
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26680839
HTML [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103
HTML [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
hackingonempty wrote 1 day ago:
It has been about 16 years since I fired up my old NeXTStation Color
where I had a copy of 1.0 or a late beta.
The last time I tried about the only site that worked was useit.com,
former home of Nielsen Norman UX experts ;-)
gerdesj wrote 1 day ago:
In 1992ish I worked at RNEC Manadon (UK, Devon). I was asked by my
boss to investigate this new www thing.
I telnetted to the nearest VAX from my Win 3.1 PC. I then telnetted to
the X.25 PAD and used that to go via the US to Switzerland and CERN.
It looked just like gopher and WAIS to me and that's how I reported
back - "it looks the same as gopher".
When Tim BL invented www, html and that, browsers were telnet and
graphics was a nonsense.
qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
I got on the 'Net in 1993. The Web was very "meh". A lot of tutorials
on how to write HTML, very little useful content yet. IRC and Usenet
were where the action was.
flomo wrote 1 day ago:
Wired Magazine famously agreed with you. Usenet was where it was at
then.
Internet commercialization wasn't really on until 1994. Then anyone
could get dial-up IP, they could put ads on their webpages, and
etc.
razingeden wrote 1 day ago:
I remember that. I had almost zero interest in www until geocities
came along and then â¦it was something else to compose and publish
a âwebsiteâ
The whole thing was atrocious but at least introduced me to the
concept.
In fact, I had to spend like three days downloading Netscape to try
it out because I didnât even have a graphical browser yet.
qingcharles wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
Every time I'm downloading something and "only" getting a
megabyte/sec download I take a deep breath and remember the days
when I was getting 0.5KB/sec.
jcims wrote 1 day ago:
I worked at an EDI company in the mid 90s. X.25 was the wild west.
We had a router set up on it that would happily stand up a ppp
session to anyone that knew the node name. No password, right on the
core network lol.
icedchai wrote 1 day ago:
It certainly was! I remember connecting to Tymnet and
Sprintnet/Telenet as a teenager, probably around 1990 or 91.
Someone on a local BBS gave me a username that let me connect to
QSD and another European chat system. Someone on there had taken
over the "system" account on a VAX and was giving out accounts that
let you use it as PAD. This went on for weeks. The company must've
freaked when they got their x.25 bill. Zero security in those days.
The early Internet was just as bad.
sigmoid10 wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
Everything connected to the internet was really bad until
automatic updates that are enabled by default (or enforced by
sysadmins) became a thing. Wordpress, Mysql, Active Directory...
all those things had unpatched exploits that you could trivially
tap in to until the 2010s if you knew how to use nmap and
metasploit. Add insecure wifi standards like wep and basically
every other network was fair game for people who had some basic
skills. Heck, facebook only made https mandatory in 2013 after
someone made a browser plugin that let literally everyone steal
cookies on public networks and log in to other people's accounts.
Gen Zers never saw this, but the modern web as a secure place
where you can comfortably buy stuff or do banking without worries
is a relatively recent invention.
hackingonempty wrote 1 day ago:
The experience was very different on a NeXT computer.
WAIS was modeled after the built in DigitalLibrarian software. You
would select a site in the upper pane, and enter a search term in the
box in the middle, and a list of documents would come back in the
bottom pane that you could double click and open. Very search engine
like.
Gopher was structured and I think Gemini today still sticks with the
format. You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a
column browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom
pane.
WWW didn't seem like much in comparison because they were freeform
documents without app level navigation support and there wasn't
support for images or much formatting and people had not learned to
make web pages so it was really hard to see the future of what it
would grow to become.
I'm not known for picking winners :-(
cxr wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
> WAIS was[â¦] Gopher was[â¦]
> You load a site and the hierarchy of links appeared in a column
browser up top and selected documents appeared in the bottom pane.
You're mentioning formats and protocols but describing application
UI designs.
donw wrote 1 day ago:
Something that just occurred to me: RAGs are almost Gopher for AIs.
jibal wrote 1 day ago:
> people had not learned to make web pages
Because there wasn't a widespread usable browser until Mosaic came
along, 2 1/2 years after WWW.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to
several revolutions in a row.
I had a friend who was the most junior developer on the Mosaic team
and one day he took me to his office to show me a text document
with an image in the middle of it. In theory I met Marc Andreesen
and Eric Bina that day but I just wanted to go do something with my
friend. I did not get it. At all. A year later my girlfriend had to
re-explain it to me and then another few months later I applied to
work there in a support role. I don't think she knew what to do
with the level of enthusiasm I wasn't bringing to this opportunity.
A year after that I'm sitting in a bar after a tech convention in
Chicago, wearing my Mosaic t-shirt, and someone said, 'where did
you get that shirt?' When I told them we were on the team, you'd
have thought I'd said we were Madonna's backup band.
I never entirely understood that "I'd rather be lucky than good"
sentiment until my luck ran out, and now I know.
lelandfe wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
Love it. This is all soo very Nelson Bighetti.
pstuart wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
Nelson did quite fine in the end.
dist-epoch wrote 1 day ago:
But you were lucky. You were in the right places at the right
time, just didn't realize it.
This is lack of vision, not lack of luck.
FpUser wrote 1 day ago:
>"My early career was defined by showing up ten minutes late to
several revolutions in a row."
Ha, I missed so many great things. The most obvious was not to
buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it just started.
Luckily (or not) I am an easy going person and do not dwell on
things.
ErroneousBosh wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
> The most obvious was not to buy $10K worth of bitcoin when it
just started.
"Forty quid for a string of hex digits? Nah, I don't think
so..."
- me, some time in 2010.
stevesimmons wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
- me, also in 2010, when a junior colleague ("what would he
know?") spent his bonus on bitcoin.
tirant wrote 1 day ago:
It could be worse: you could have bought bitcoin when it
started and then have sold it for a profit of $40. ;)
Izkata wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
There was a website back when I was in college where you'd
click through some presentation or tutorial or something
about bitcoin and at the end they'd just give you 0.5 bitcoin
for free.
nurettin wrote 1 day ago:
In the beginning you didn't really buy BTC. You could mine a
few off of your nvidia card in less than a week.
I was focused on doing useless things like cracking md5 hashed
passwords and didn't really believe you could pay for things
with it.
Regret on a different level.
tirant wrote 1 day ago:
We used to tests servers before deploying them to customers
and for that we ran intensive CPU software for days.
I told my direct manager to mine bitcoin for fun. But he
being a nerd for UFOs proposed to use Seti@Home.
This was 2009, months after the official launch.
We had extremely expensive servers with multi-cpu setups
continuously running. We could have become easily one of the
top miners nodes in the world back then. But instead we
helped to proof the lack of alien communication towards the
earth.
MarcelOlsz wrote 1 day ago:
Hey at least you didn't aggressively "day trade" it all away
with your idiot friends who moved in and tried to start a
"fund". Good times.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
I have decided that the âstart investing early for compound
interestâ advice is actually a very clever white lie told
to young adults everywhere.
The point of starting early is not compound interest. Itâs
to experience loss when you still have a pittance in the
market. The older you get the bigger the chunk of cash you
can put in, and if you donât understand Let it Ride and
rebalancing before 20% is a loss of thousands instead of
hundreds of dollars, youâre gonna have a bad time.
The only compound interest that really matters is what you
get when you have a substantial stake that you also havenât
blown up chasing fads or snake oil. So the advice is
technically true but also technically beside the point.
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
I could have retired making early iPhone apps but I was already
so burned out on how shitty mobile carriers were behaving that
I just sat it out.
fsloth wrote 1 day ago:
Fun fact: Erwise[0] was the first _graphical_ browser developed by a
group of students in Helsinki University of Technology with Sir Berners
Lee. Sadly there was no funding in Finland available at the time and
they had to abandon the project and most of the group ended up working
at Tekla, contributing to a bunch of cool AEC CAD technology (Tekla is
now a Trimble subsidiary).
[0]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise
cxr wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
> Erwise[0] was the first _graphical_ browser
No, as indicated in the submission the original WorldWideWeb.app
(developed on a NeXTCube) is a graphical Web browser.
rurban wrote 1 day ago:
Not really. In Graz we had our better Hyper-G graphical browser
before CERN, with a completely integrated system to ensure link
consistency. Every browser was also the editor. In 1989. [1] At CERN
they wanted to enrich gopher with multimedia data to share building
plans and images of their complicated plans, in Graz we wanted to
provide a rich teaching and information platform for students. Sadly
we went commercial and not open source, so worse got better. Well, a
session-less server as httpd was actually better.
HTML [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.08057
classichasclass wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
It's a shame that Hyper-G has not been better preserved. It had
some remarkable features (disclosure, my article: [1] ).
HTML [1]: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hierarc...
rurban wrote 18 hours 18 min ago:
Fixed link:
HTML [1]: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/05/prior-art-dept-hiera...
fsloth wrote 1 day ago:
Ah - I stand corrected - thanks!
java-man wrote 1 day ago:
All the links should point to the 1989 internet instead of "Not Found"
:-)
lysace wrote 1 day ago:
It's a javascript-based imitation, much like all of those js-based
imitations of various Windows versions.
The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since
it is actually available.
IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep +
TimBL's original code (mirror: [1] ) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten
to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):
HTML [1]: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373
ErroneousBosh wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
TimBL's original NeXT is still on display at CERN, I've seen it.
I've even stood in the office that was his when he wrote it (it was
empty when I was there, but had recently been in use by some
incredibly high-end physicist).
krackers wrote 1 day ago:
You can already run nextstep in browser, see [1] (section "Back to
1992")
HTML [1]: https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/
nine_k wrote 1 day ago:
A WASM emulator of 68040 and NeXT, the original OS and compiler, then
run WWW on top of that.
The performance would likely be comparable %)
actionfromafar wrote 1 day ago:
The performance would likely be much better. :-)
lysace wrote 1 day ago:
An example from a year later; 1990:
HTML [1]: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows30
spijdar wrote 1 day ago:
Every version of NeXT is actually catalogued and can be run in
the browser at: [1] I'm pretty sure the CERN WorldWideWeb
application is also included in the "bonus software" HDD, but
I'm on my phone right now and can't confirm. :-)
HTML [1]: https://infinitemac.org/
jmclnx wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting, for some reason I thought lynx was the first browser. I
thought I read that a while ago.
But it makes sense it is a GUI browser since it was developed on a NeXT
hinkley wrote 1 day ago:
IIRC, Viola also got scooped by Mosaic, which was the first browser
most people used, before you could buy one shrinkwrapped at a store.
[1] There was also OmniWeb on the Next machine, but there weren't a
lot of NeXT machines around.
Mosaic was the first browser to support images because HTML didn't
support images and Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina sat in a coffee shop
on campus while Marc talked himself into going rogue and making his
own tag while Eric didn't talk him out of it (source, Eric Bina, ACM
lecture at UIUC ca 1995)
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW
wahern wrote 1 day ago:
WorldWideWeb didn't originally support inline images, and while using
a graphical toolkit rendered pages more like Lynx, albeit with the
ability to vary fonts. Lynx wasn't the first WWW browser, but came
along shortly after, a year or so after WorldWideWeb, and is the
oldest browser still maintained. See [1] I'm having trouble pinning
down when WorldWideWeb got inline image support, but based on [2] I'm
guessing sometime between 1992 and 1994, when there are screenshots
with inline images, so maybe after Lynx was published.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser#Ear...
HTML [2]: https://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/Feat...
dunham wrote 1 day ago:
It's been a very long time, but my recollection was the Mosaic did
images first, and it was non-standard. (The beginning of the end.)
I might be thinking of some other feature though.
I was also disappointed that the editing went away after the first
browser. (There was "Amaya" which had editing, but it was a
research thing and not a commonly used browser.)
WillAdams wrote 1 day ago:
Well there was this image:
HTML [1]: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/18/les-horribles-ce...
wahern wrote 1 day ago:
WorldWideWeb could display images, but originally only in a
separate window when you clicked on them, similar to the way
audio, PDFs, and other multimedia worked (and sometimes still
work). The wording of one of the people involved seems to confirm
this:
> How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone,
as the one above was the first picture of a band ever to be
clicked on in a web browser!"
Source:
HTML [1]: https://musiclub.web.cern.ch/bands/cernettes/firstband.h...
tylerdane wrote 1 day ago:
Direct link to the browser:
HTML [1]: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/browser/
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
Did you notice you can click anywhere in the text and edit it?
Something was lost along the way.
(Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to do
that)
thenthenthen wrote 1 day ago:
The original read/write web
dadoum wrote 1 day ago:
F12, Console, type
document.designMode = 'on'
dadoum wrote 1 day ago:
(it is slightly different though, as links cannot be followed)
creddit wrote 1 day ago:
F12, Console, type
document.designMode = 'off'
wesammikhail wrote 1 day ago:
I had no idea. You just blew my mind
karlgkk wrote 1 day ago:
> (Nowadays you need a separate wiki engine on a site to be able to
do that)
No you donât. These browser simply PUTs the request and your web
server simply edits the document. Versioning is optional, of
course.
krapp wrote 1 day ago:
Do we know that they didn't have some backend code handing the
editing?
I don't think a web where every page is globally editable by
default would be a good idea, but I can't imagine at all how it
would work without a backend, unless all of the changes are just
local. But that seems pointless.
shakna wrote 1 day ago:
Being able to change stylesheets, disable or enhance various
JavaScript scripts, add notes and annotations, and other things,
is exactly the idea of a user agent.
The user makes a request, and then does whatever they like with
the answer. Not just whatever is sensible, but whatever they want
to do.
If that concept somehow became accepted again... I think the
accessible web might well become a solved problem, rather than an
endless slog.
snigsnog wrote 1 day ago:
>Being able to change stylesheets [1] >disable or enhance
various JavaScript scripts [2] [3] Yeah you can't directly
alter scripts being ran (as far as I know?) but you can usually
override/extend behavior and can definitely add your own
>add notes and annotations [4] (I haven't actually used this
one, just first result)
HTML [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us...
HTML [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-...
HTML [3]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tamperm...
HTML [4]: https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/
shakna wrote 1 day ago:
I'm aware of plugins. But these used to be builtin features.
Developers needed to work with them, rather than making it
harder and harder to use them to make the users life easiee.
idiotsecant wrote 1 day ago:
In what way is that not currently possible? All browsers I know
of you can edit whatever you want in any page you download
shakna wrote 1 day ago:
You'll need to do a bit of work to make it the way it used to
be. Editing any text on a page, or having your changes save
persistently, needs a bit of a... Framework, to keep things
together, rather than being the expected mode of interaction.
Sure, I can add a p to the tree. But if I refresh, its gone.
I'll probably need plugins to keep my own stylesheets and JS
changes around.
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
HTTP has PUT and DELETE for a reason ;-)
zabzonk wrote 1 day ago:
> But that seems pointless.
Making notes for your own consumption?
actionfromafar wrote 1 day ago:
Upload the file when you are done, perhaps?
DIR <- back to front page