What Goes Around Comes Around
April 26
Back in 1994-95, when I first started working on the web and the web was young, web pages were generally designed around one simple and near-universal concept: providing information to as many people as possible in most efficient and effective way possible.
Much of that mindset comes from the academic, technical and military origins of the Web, where nerdy types would use the ‘net as a way of publishing and collaborating on the sorts of dense, text-heavy types of topics academics seem to love. As a side note, why the fledgling HTML language never really developed an effective way of producing mathematical notation is something of a mystery to me, given these roots in academia.
The state of hardware and software back then also contributed to the text-heavy nature of web pages back then. Slow modems, slow processors, small screens, limited color support and paleolithic browsers all meant that your big images and fancy effects would be seen poorly, if at all.
Finally, writing HTML back then was both relatively difficult (at least in comparison to knocking it out in the dreaded FrontPage) and the skillsets of HTML writers was generally pretty meager. This was, after all, a brand new thing. Few, if any, web wranglers had yet developed their extensive knowledge of various browser bugs.
So what the user got was a web tailor-made for sharing information and ideas that they could access from any browser, with any configuration, and little blocking them from getting the information (other than the download speed of their modem). And then it all went wrong…
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