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CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

posted by janrinok on Thursday February 21 2019, @04:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-old-days dept.

canopic jug writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 22 2019, @09:22AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday February 22 2019, @09:22AM (#804954) Journal

    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

    • The reimplementation of WorldWideWeb uses some JavaScript construct that my browser either doesn't support or doesn't interpret correctly (possibly through interference with some installed extension).
    • The reimplementation of WorldWideWeb doesn't actually implement the corresponding HTML feature (something related to text input fields, forms and/or POST)
         
      • either because their implementation is incomplete in this respect,
      • or because those didn't yet exist in HTML at the time the original browser was written.

    (And BTW, I just noticed that SN mishandles line breaks in nested <ul>)

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