The History of the Web

>Except those are not the alternatives. The alternatives are consistently rendered websites or inconsistently rendered websites. If browsers had strictly enforced HTML syntax from the beginning, noone would ever have built websites with "little issues in the markup".

Thats not reality, if everyone got perfect formed input we wouldn't be having this debate, the reality is it occurs, so what do you do, reject it or accept it and try and do something with it. XHTML simply rejects malformed markup and you get a blank page, HTML tries to make sense of it and render something.

>IP stacks do not accept randomly misformatted IP packets. The result is obviously not that you constantly encounter internet services that you can not access because your IP stack is picky about broken IP packets, the result is that noone ever sends you broken IP packets.

So you never heard of ECN? The ECN bits being set where technically incorrect depending on how pedantic you where in the interpretation and some stacks rejected packets if the bits weren't set to zero. Due to he robustness principle most stacks ignored these bits allowing others to use them for ECN, allowing a graceful update to the spec. The stacks that took your stance however and rejected where simply roadblocks in the adoption.

>No, it just isn't. You are just looking at a very small part of the consequences of this implementation strategy that indeed happens to be positive, but completely ignoring the big picture of all the…

https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/

"While CSS was still just a draft, Netscape had pressed on with presentational HTML elements like multicol, layer, and the dreaded blink tag. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, had taken to incorporating some of CSS piecemeal. But their support was spotty and, at times, incorrect. Which means that by the early aughts, after five years of CSS as an official recommendation, there were still no browsers with full CSS support.

That came from kind of a strange place.

When Tantek Çelik joined Internet Explorer for Macintosh in 1997, his team was pretty small. A year later, he was made the lead developer of the rendering engine at the same as his team was cut in half. Most of the focus for Microsoft (for obvious reasons) was on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, and the Macintosh team was mostly left to their own devices. So Starting with the development of version 5 in 2000, Çelik and his team decided to put their focus where no one else was, CSS support.

It would take the team two years to finish version 5. During this time, Çelik spoke frequently with members of the W3C and web designers using their browser. As each piece slid into place, the IE-for-Mac team verified on all fronts that they were getting things just right. Finally, in March of 2002, they shipped Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. The first browser with full CSS Level 1 support."

> But in the early 90’s, nothing like this existed on the web. The concept, however, was not unheard of. Archie was a system that used crawling to help users find FTP files, and is commonly known as the Internet’s first search engine.

There's also Veronica - a play on the Archie comic strip - which crawled gopherspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)

But I actually came here to mention a different sort of search that existed around 1994 or so.

Someone had a modified version of Mosaic which would crawl and search all documents which were one or two links away from the current URL.

That is, if you are on, say, https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-searched-before-search/ and did a search for "Veronica" then it would look search that page, and then find and follow all of the links in the page and search them. And even repeat for another link.

This would help if you remembered that you found X connected to Y, and while you can remember X you don't quite remember where Y was.

> At the time, NCSA was best known for Mosaic, later Netscape Navigator, later Mozilla Firefox.

Their own link says that "Netscape’s browser was a complete rewrite of Mosaic. ... The newly formed company didn’t have a right to any of the code that their programmers wrote when they were at NCSA."

It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's just not something that matters in this kind of strategic product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just a signal it's not worth engaging imo).

There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're going to mock competition you better hope you're apple and not netscape [0][1].

I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive offering and they failed to do that.

[0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/

[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n_581a0e66e4b01f610e396815

> The web was designed to publish documents, it was never intended to build applications.

I find that repeated a lot, but to me, it's somewhere between an overstatement and a misconception.

Sure, the early web wasn't anywhere near the versatility of what we have today, and interactivity was extremely limited (and as you say, is still more complex than it ought to be). But the semantics of HTTP+HTML, from the early days, allowed for application development. If all we had had were <p>, <h1>, <aside> and GET, sure, documents it is. But we had forms and POST and everything you need to make a CRUD application from the early 90s. It was pretty basic, but so was support for documents (tell Desktop Publishing people that HTML in the 90s was good for documents, and they're not likely to agree much).

Just as one example, what is this, of not an application: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/

Absolutely agree Google Maps is also awful. For transit I've completely ditched google for Citymapper (I'm in London). I think at this point Google is a reasonable fallback mostly when you expect to want someone you think would be paying Google.

Remember Goto [1]? The search engine that at the time was much maligned for letting people ... buy sponsored results and arguing it made their results better...

Goto became Overture...

Overture was bought by Yahoo.

But where Yahoo faded away, Google has largely become Goto 2.0.

There are narrow niches where that model works for users. When you're specifically searching for a shop for example, it's often ok.

But for everything else it's absolutely awful.

[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/goto-forgotten-search-engine/