Happy Birthday to Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the #WorldWideWeb, #HTML, #HTTP, and the #opensource #dataprivacy initiative #ProjectSolid!

Thank you for your contributions to #tech that have changed the world.

"In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

via https://mastodon.social/@mcc/114605076806447333

back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.

i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.

i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @tomjennings and @scott, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet

this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.

it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

for the past few years, i'm sure many of you have read my many lamentations about the death of the old, small web many of us grew up with.

there are tons of static site generators out there, but none of them did what i wanted: something that could build an entire site without futzing with javascript and library dependencies. i wanted something that we would have had in 2005, but didn't have in 2025.

in january, i decided to do something about it instead of whining. i started gluing together a few php scripts i had been using to build blogs, rss feeds and mini homepages. i even wrote a new mini markup language.

i thought it would take me a week. it took >3 months.

it ran for the past month as globaltalk.network's interactive site, and many of you asked if i'd ever let other people spin up an instance. i can finally say: yes!

today, kiki is officially finished and released for public use. named after my little black house demon, it's small, fast, and sometimes well behaved. and, it's all written in php without a single external dependency. just unzip and go.

it's released as shareware - in the oldest, finest, jankiest meaning of the word: you're free to goof around with and share the unregistered version. build your own little kiki instance, and customize the heck out of it until it feels like your own little home in the world wide web:

http://tomodashi.com/kiki

today’s absolutely mission critical acquisition: a cisco 2500 AS2511-RJ router/access server, which will be turned into a dial-up isp with a pile of 14.4k-33.6k external modems

circa 1995

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

On 12 March it was the anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee.

Did you know that Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist and that the internet (as we know it) was created in Geneva, Switzerland?

He also created the HTML language, the URL system and the HTTP protocol.

So, when you type a website address (URL) into your address bar in your browser like this:

http://www

you're actually using Sir Tim's work.

Curiously, he later regretted using the initial pair of slashes '//' on the address though - it was a design choice hated by a lot people. (Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8306631.stm)
#worldwideweb #internet #technology #european

Has the World Wide Web turned the world better or worse?

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑫𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉 𝑶𝒇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑾𝒆𝒃

https://garry.net/posts/the-death-of-the-web

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss at CERN. “Vague but exciting” was his feedback. The project later became the World Wide Web.

Thank you, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for changing the world!

Why is there barely any innovation in de web browser space regarding making the web more read/writeable, automatic sharing bookmarks with friends, alternative distribution models other than client/server http, etc.

Why is there so little actual innovation and development?

From the year 2001:

I remember when web-sites like this were considered very, very, sleek, new, and fancy.

And, compared to what web-sites tended to look like in the 1990s, they were!

@cybercultural @ricmac

RE: https://indieweb.social/@cybercultural/113989953061003587

The Web has been voluntarily opt-out since the early to mid- 1990s.

Before that, there was no opt-ing out.

The act of putting something onto the (open) Web was (and still is) understood as consent for others to use your data.

This is the norm of the Web — and has been for decades.

I think it is unlikely this norm is going to change any time soon.

"Internet may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it." (December 5th, 2000)

The #Fediverse is an alternative to the big corporate #socialmedia companies. Some think it may even save the #worldwideweb. But is it worth it? Should we try to save what has become a cesspit of #bigotry and #disinformation? I’m not so sure anymore.

Découvertes web du jour

• https://www.capoupascap.info/
• https://transiscope.org/ - une carte des luttes et alternatives pour la transition écologique
• https://copiepublique.fr/ - Soutien financier aux logiciels libres.
• https://www.permapotes.com/fr/calendar/save - Un calendrier de semis personnalisable par climat & légumes.

Et cet article : https://unseen-japan.com/learn-japanese-without-duolingo/ qui m'a permis d'ajouter à ma liste de ressources pour apprendre le japonais :

• https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/
• https://www.renshuu.org/
• https://www.wanikani.com/
• https://skritter.com/

En plus de :

• https://learnjapanese.moe/guide/
• https://www.kanjistudyapp.com/index.html
• https://gohoneko.neocities.org/grammar/taekim
• https://www.loecsen.com/en/learn-japanese#/en/Essentialsque j'avais déjà avant dans mes marque-pages.

La plupart de ces ressources ont été partagées sur Masto et j'ai dû les booster dans ce cas. On est pas vraiment dans le Small Web aujourd'hui mais je voulais quand même partager ces ressources