In 1989, while at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee submitted "Information Management: A Proposal" to his boss, Mike Sendall.

We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.

The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use.

Sendall wrote ‘Vague, but exciting’ on that proposal.

Massive understatement!

In 1996 I built my first website (for a friend's band) which started me on a career that I still love to this day.

Happy 30th birthday World Wide Web, and thank you Tim Berners-Lee.

Nine people came together at CERN for five days and made something amazing. I still can’t quite believe it.

This is a wonderful project in celebration of the Web's 30th birthday, recreating the first ever browser, WorldWideWeb, which ran on NeXT machines.

My first job in technology, working on the computer support desk at Coventry University (back in 1995… eek!), involved looking after a number of NeXT machines. So even outside of the Web angle, this project is full of all sorts of nostalgia and memories for me. And how incredible is it that they've built the browser inside a browser!

I'm extremely pleased about how this site renders in WorldWideWeb, a testemant to the resilience of plain old semantic HTML

If you want to have a play with any of your own sites, getting started is a little different to these days:

1. Launch the WorldWideWeb browser.
2. Select "Document" from the menu on the side.
3. Select "Open from full document reference".
4. Type a URL into the "reference" field.
5. Click "Open".

And remember, you need to double click on links to activate them.

Last night I attended the always excellent JS Oxford, and as well as having my mind expanded by both Jo and Ruth's talks (Lemmings make an excellent analogy for multi-threading, who knew!), I gave a brief talk on the Indieweb movement.

If you've not heard of Indieweb movement before, it's a push to encourage people to claim their own bit of the web, for their identity and content, free from corporate platforms. It's not about abandoning those platforms, but ensuring that you have control of your content if something goes wrong.

From the Indieweb site:

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

I've been interested in the Indieweb for a while, after attending IndieWebCamp Brighton in 2016, and I've been slowly implementing Indieweb features on here ever since.

So far I've added rel="me" attributes to allow distributed verification, and to enable Indieauth support, h-card to establish identity, and h-entry for information discovery. Behind the scenes I'm looking at webmentions (Thanks to Perch's first class support), and there's the ever-eternal photo management thing I keep picking up and then running away from.

The great thing about the Indieweb is that you can implement as much or as little as you want, and it always gives you something to work on. It doesn't matter where you start. The act of getting your own domain is the first step on a longer journey.

To that end I'm interested in organising an IndieWebCamp Oxford this year. If this sounds like something that interests you, then come find me in the Digital Oxford Slack, or on Twitter.

The web is like the ship of Theseus—so much of it has been changed and added to over time. That doesn’t mean its initial design was flawed—just the opposite. It means that its initial design wasn’t unnecessarily rigid. The simplicity of the early web wasn’t a bug, it was a feature.

Jeremy Keith on the origins of the web and the false idea that it was designed solely for sharing documents.

We were helping test Ruth's new site in the Digital Oxford Slack a few days ago, and the topic of easter eggs and silly little things came up. Ruth wanted some quotes from us to scatter in amongst the source of her site, and we helpfully obliged.

It reminded me of a little tribute that I added to the HTTP headers of this site when Terry Pratchet passed, and how your site should be a place to play, and experiment.

So I've added something else. You'll have to go find it though.

I'm going to play more.