CERN has published a javascript implementation of their original web browser. The browser itself, WorldWideWeb, is text only and predates not only graphical browsing but also cookies, the pox javascript, and HTTPS. Their site dedicated to the browser also has a brief history of the application which was built in 1989 as a progenitor to what we know as "the web" today, timeline spanning three decades on either side of its release, instructions for its use, a look at some of the original code of WorldWideWeb, how the WorldWideWeb browser was rebuilt, various historical and technical resources, and who did the work to make this possible. Interestingly some current web sites are apparently standards compliant enough that they function, somewhat, in the old browser.
Hello, World
In December 1990, an application called WorldWideWeb was developed on a NeXT machine at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN) just outside of Geneva. This program – WorldWideWeb — is the antecedent of most of what we consider or know of as "the web" today.
In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:59PM (2 children)
I just tried soylentnews.org; it can be read (with some doublings in the comment titles, but AFAIK that's a side effect of the JS-free comment hiding implementation on this site; CSS certainly didn't exist back then), but unfortunately posting doesn't work (the input field doesn't react on the input; I don't know if the problem is due to CERN's implementation being incomplete in that respect, due to some JS incompatibilities of my browser, or if the SN posting interface maybe uses some feature that was only introduced in later versions of HTML).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @08:26AM (1 child)
Hmmm... I block JS by default, also for SN. I can read and post (as AC, maybe the account requires JS).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 22 2019, @09:22AM
I meant the JS that WorldWideWeb browser is (re)implemented in, not the JS that is part of SoylentNews (it is clear to me that this would not be executed by WoldWideWeb because at that time there was no JavaScript in the web).
And while I usually browse without JavaScript (although I indeed enable it on SN because I trust this site), quite obviously I couldn't try their WorldWideWeb reimplementation without temporarily enabling JavaScript; I decided that CERN should be trustworthy enough to do so (and in addition, they didn't include any code or content from third-party sites).
So the three options I mentioned are
(And BTW, I just noticed that SN mishandles line breaks in nested <ul>)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.