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The History of the Web
Personal blog · thehistoryoftheweb.comwebhistory
The History of the Web is a personal blog at thehistoryoftheweb.com about web and history. Since 2017, 86 different Hacker News readers have linked it 153 times, most often “The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite it for web history: browser wars, CSS, the img tag, early sites like Pizza Hut's, and a timeline. Some call it a good starting point for reading about how the web developed.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called 'interesting' and 'really cool'; a Pizza Hut post gives more context; a good starting point; worth a look for the img tag.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This project is my decade-long journey through web history. What began as a simple timeline has evolved into an intricate […]
Most-linked posts?
- The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-10-22
- We Are Still the Web5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-08-05
- Origin of the "img" Tag4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-09
- Vague, but Exciting4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-02-07
- The History of the Web4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-07-24
- Do blogs need to be so lonely?3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-08-21
- What Happened to the Webmaster (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-06-16
- How We Got the Favicon (2017)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-10
- The Analog Web3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-16
- When the Wizards of the Web Met3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-01
What Hacker News says?
Some history here: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG#History - https://annevankesteren.nl/2011/02/html-development - https://annevankesteren.nl/2016/01/film-at-11 - https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/when-standards-divide/ Differences between the W3C HTML 5.2 spec and the WHATWG Living Spec: https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/W3C-WHATWG-Differences
Comment linking /when-standards-divide/
on “Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple Object to W3C Fork of DOM Spec”Submitted How We Got the Favicon (2017) as a story · 146 points
HN discussionThis might be a situation where we need to publicly shame Google into optimizing Chrome. Something akin to 1998 CSS1 Test Suite ACID tests https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-rise-of-css/ making a case for IE/Netscape fixing their bad implementations.
Comment linking /the-rise-of-css/
on “Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS”Submitted The Web from 1989 to 1994 as a story · 110 points
HN discussionThis sort of happened when the WHATWG effectively wrested control of HTML away from the W3C (although Google was not a founding member, they are one of the Steering Members now). https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/when-standards-divide/ The membership of the W3C supported XHTML, to improve interoperability among other reasons. Apple, Mozilla and Opera had a different vision and broke away and formed the WHATWG which Goo…
Comment linking /when-standards-divide/
on “Never connect to ProtonMail using Chrome”Submitted It’s 1997 and you want to build a website as a story · 107 points
HN discussionhttps://thehistoryoftheweb.com/before-there-were-smartphones... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-7908-1746-5_17 https://www.zdnet.com/article/where-are-they-now-i-mode/
Comment linking /before-there-were-smartphones-there-was-i-mode/
on “Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)”Submitted The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018) as a story · 107 points
HN discussion> Developers of the past I'm only 36, but you're making me feel extremely old. To me, "developers of the past" were the people working on COBOL and JCL and FORTRAN and DB2, on z/OS or System 390/370/360, to whom "RPG" was only a 4GL[1], not a type of game, and there was no webmaster or graphic designer involved... not some dotcom era dev in the 90s when "webmasters" became a widespread thing. Here's an interesting a…
Comment linking /postscript/what-happened-to-the-webmaster/
on “Effects of Gen AI on High Skilled Work: Experiments with Software Developers”Submitted Building ColdFusion for the Web as a story · 92 points
HN discussion> The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web Reminds me of the Browser Wars of yesteryear, when Microsoft and Netscape invented their own unnecessary, easily abused, proprietary HTML tags, such as blink and marquee. [1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/blink-marquis-tag/
Comment linking /blink-marquis-tag/
on “Feds may target Google's Chrome browser for breakup”Submitted A Fun List of Browsers as a story · 88 points
HN discussionThis is not quite what you want but The History of the Web is a newsletter that does stories on various topics. Here's the site with archives: http://thehistoryoftheweb.com/
Comment linking /
on “Languages Which Almost Became CSS”Submitted The Web's Timeline as a story · 78 points
HN discussionFor the past few years I've been reading https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/timeline/ Really cool to see different groups and technologies and how they moved the web!
Comment linking /timeline/
on “Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?”Submitted How we searched before search (2017) as a story · 36 points
HN discussion>Except those are not the alternatives. The alternatives are consistently rendered websites or inconsistently rendered websites. If browsers had strictly enforced HTML syntax from the beginning, noone would ever have built websites with "little issues in the markup". Thats not reality, if everyone got perfect formed input we wouldn't be having this debate, the reality is it occurs, so what do you do, reject it or ac…
Comment linking /when-standards-divide/
on “Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output”Submitted Do blogs need to be so lonely? as a story · 21 points
HN discussionApparently, the site automatically redirects me to the standard German site. Fantastic. My hate for the modern web continues to grow. You could replace the protagonists of I Have No Mouth with walking, talking websites and it'd roughly mirror what I'm feeling right now. The only way I could see what everybody was talking about was by checking out https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/ and the archive.or…
Comment linking /postscript/pizzanet/
on “Pizza Hut’s First Website”Submitted AOL Pretends to Be the Internet as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThis is not strictly Pizza Hut's first website. Pizza Hut's first website was built in 1994 [1]. This webpage has Javascript (1995) [2] running Google Tag Manager (2012) [3]. The article about Pizza Hut's first website [1] provides more context than just the webpage. [1]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/postscript/pizzanet/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_…
Comment linking /postscript/pizzanet/
on “Pizza Hut’s First Website”Submitted SOAP and REST At Odds (2017) as a story · 20 points
HN discussion> The web was designed to publish documents, it was never intended to build applications. I find that repeated a lot, but to me, it's somewhere between an overstatement and a misconception. Sure, the early web wasn't anywhere near the versatility of what we have today, and interactivity was extremely limited (and as you say, is still more complex than it ought to be). But the semantics of HTTP+HTML, from the early d…
Comment linking /postscript/pizzanet/
on “Writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc”Submitted Wait, What's a Bookmarklet? as a story · 18 points
HN discussionhttps://thehistoryoftheweb.com/look-back-history-css/ "While CSS was still just a draft, Netscape had pressed on with presentational HTML elements like multicol, layer, and the dreaded blink tag. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, had taken to incorporating some of CSS piecemeal. But their support was spotty and, at times, incorrect. Which means that by the early aughts, after five years of CSS as an official rec…
Comment linking /look-back-history-css/
on “25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0”Submitted Can Directories Rise Again? as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI feel that it should have Feb. 2, 2000 - CERT publishes the first advisory about cross-site scripting https://web.archive.org/web/20000302105858/http://www.cert.o... (on the https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/timeline/?date_from=1997&date... page, of course)
Comment linking /timeline/?date_from=1997&date_to=2000
on “The Web from 1989 to 1994”Submitted The First Thing That Ever Sold Online Was Pizza (2018) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionYou can also sign up for my newsletter, where I regularly sound out stories about web history and new additions to the (still growing) timeline! https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/
Comment linking /
on “The Web from 1989 to 1994”Submitted Origin of the "img" Tag as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
