Simon Willison's Weblog: web

Quoting Tim Berners-Lee

2025-10-06T16:02:37+00:00

I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it.

But for the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.

— Tim Berners-Lee, Why I gave the world wide web away for free

Tags: web, tim-berners-lee, computer-history

Today's research challenge: why is August 1st "World Wide Web Day"?

2024-08-01T17:34:29+00:00

Today's research challenge: why is August 1st "World Wide Web Day"?

Here's a fun mystery. A bunch of publications will tell you that today, August 1st, is "World Wide Web Day"... but where did that idea come from?

It's not an official day marked by any national or international organization. It's not celebrated by CERN or the W3C.

The date August 1st doesn't appear to hold any specific significance in the history of the web. The first website was launched on August 6th 1991.

I posed the following three questions this morning on Mastodon:

Who first decided that August 1st should be "World Wide Web Day"?
Why did they pick that date?
When was the first World Wide Web Day celebrated?

Finding answers to these questions has proven stubbornly difficult. Searches on Google have proven futile, and illustrate the growing impact of LLM-generated slop on the web: they turn up dozens of articles celebrating the day, many from news publications playing the "write about what people might search for" game and many others that have distinctive ChatGPT vibes to them.

One early hint we've found is in the "Bylines 2010 Writer's Desk Calendar" by Snowflake Press, published in January 2009. Jessamyn West spotted that on the book's page in the Internet Archive, but it merely lists "World Wide Web Day" at the bottom of the July calendar page (clearly a printing mistake, the heading is meant to align with August 1st on the next page) without any hint as to the origin:

I found two earlier mentions from August 1st 2008 on Twitter, from @GabeMcCauley and from @iJess.

Our earliest news media reference, spotted by Hugo van Kemenade, is also from August 1st 2008: this opinion piece in the Attleboro Massachusetts Sun Chronicle, which has no byline so presumably was written by the paper's editorial board:

Today is World Wide Web Day, but who cares? We'd rather nap than surf. How about you? Better relax while you can: August presages the start of school, a new season of public meetings, worries about fuel costs, the rundown to the presidential election and local races.

So the mystery remains! Who decided that August 1st should be "World Wide Web Day", why that date and how did it spread so widely without leaving a clear origin story?

If your research skills are up to the challenge, join the challenge!

Tags: history, internet-archive, w3c, web, mastodon, slop

We can have a different web

2024-05-02T02:41:54+00:00

We can have a different web

Molly White’s beautifully optimistic manifesto for creating a better web. Read the whole thing, or even better, find some headphones and a dog and go for a walk listening to the audio version.

Via @molly0xfff

Tags: web, molly-white

Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022

2022-08-31T23:23:54+00:00

Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022

Stuart Langridge describes the architecture and decision process behind his new mobile web game, Farmbound.

Tags: stuart-langridge, web

Quoting Tom MacWright

2022-03-04T16:11:08+00:00

Working with the web platform is dealing with history, with the accumulated matter of quirksmode and good-enough standards. In exchange for the ability to deliver instantly-updating software directly to customers with no middlemen and no installation, you have to absorb a great deal of nearly-useless information that’s entirely about dodging meaningless traps.

— Tom MacWright

Tags: web, tom-macwright

Breaking Changes to the Web Platform

2021-08-06T06:32:23+00:00

Breaking Changes to the Web Platform

“Over the years there have been necessary changes to the web platform that caused legacy websites to break.”—this list is thankfully very short, only 11 items so far. Let’s hope it stays that way!

Via @styfle

Tags: web

2020 Web Milestones

2020-01-24T04:43:16+00:00

2020 Web Milestones

A lot of stuff is happening in 2020! Mike Sherov rounds it up—highlights include the release of Chromium Edge (Microsoft’s Chrome-powered browser for Windows 7+), Web Components supported in every major browser, Deno 1.x, SameSite Cookies turned on by default (which should dramatically reduce CSRF exposure) and Python 2 and Flash EOLs.

Via @mikesherov

Tags: chrome, csrf, flash, internet-explorer, javascript, python, web, deno, samesite

Quoting Tim Bray

2018-09-01T01:41:30+00:00

When you’re pumping messages around the Internet between heterogeneous codebases built by people who don’t know each other, shit is gonna happen. That’s the whole basis of the Web: You can safely ignore an HTTP header or HTML tag you don’t understand, and nothing breaks. It’s great because it allows people to just try stuff out, and the useful stuff catches on while the bad ideas don’t break anything.

— Tim Bray

Tags: web, tim-bray, messaging

Quoting Ben Ward

2010-05-06T20:53:00+00:00

Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content

— Ben Ward

Tags: ben-ward, html, links, web, webapps, recovered

Play framework for Java

2009-10-25T23:21:36+00:00

Play framework for Java

I’m genuinely impressed by this—it’s a full stack web framework for Java that actually does feel a lot like Django or Rails. Best feature: code changes are automatically detected and reloaded by the development web server, giving you the same save-and-refresh workflow you get in Django (no need to compile and redeploy to try out your latest changes).

Tags: django, frameworks, java, play, rails, web

Quoting Tim Bray

2009-07-16T10:16:30+00:00

I propose that the World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.

— Tim Bray

Tags: web, tim-bray, computer-science, education

The Web vs. the Fallacies

2009-05-25T23:49:45+00:00

The Web vs. the Fallacies

Tim Bray on how the architecture of the Web helps developers handle the Fallacies of Distributed Computing.

Tags: fallacies, tim-bray, web

Quoting Matt Webb

2008-01-01T12:13:00+00:00

The technological future of the Web is in micro and macro structure. The approach to the micro is akin to proteins and surface binding--or, to put it another way, phenotropics and pattern matching. Massively parallel agents need to be evolved to discover how to bind onto something that looks like a blog post; a crumb-trail; a right-hand nav; a top 10 list; a review; an event description; search boxes.

— Matt Webb

Tags: matt-webb, web, microformats, phenotropics, patternmatching, ai-agents

Getting from point A to B (the right way)

2007-10-11T14:30:00+00:00

My answer to Getting from point A to B (the right way) on Ask MetaFilter

If your laptop is relatively recent it might have hardware support for virtualization (Intel Core Duo chips do, for example). If so, it's worth looking in to using VMWare or Parallels to run a virtual linux server locally on your machine. You'll need a fair amount of RAM for this as well - 2 GB minimum probably.

I do this and it's fantastic as a development tool. I've got an Ubuntu virtual server which means I can install pretty much anything I want to with an apt-get - then I mount it to my "real" laptop over Samba so I can edit files with a local text editor. Best of both worlds.

I can't recommend using source control enough - it's not that tricky to get started with and it means you'll never be afraid of changing code again (since you can always roll back). I'd go for Subversion - newer systems are more trendy, but for a single person getting started with version control subversion will probably be easiest to pick up. This book should help: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/svn2

Tags: ask-metafilter, development, mysql, php, platform, web, workflow, work, efficiency, optimization

How is Google giving me access to this page?

2006-12-27T14:38:00+00:00

My answer to How is Google giving me access to this page? on Ask MetaFilter

Google have an open URL redirector, so you can craft a link that uses that:

Link via redirector

Tags: ask-metafilter, authentication, google, security, web