Where the web comes from
Where the ideas came from, and who imagined what we now take for granted.
Reflections on thirty years in tech: as a writer, a designer, a developer and a user.
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When we stopped writing on our own sites
How blogging made the early web personal, and what we gave up for the platforms
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Information architecture: when librarians came to the web
Around the turn of the century, people trained to organise libraries turned to the web and started to make it findable.
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The promise of XML
The mark-up language XML promised that anything written once could be published anywhere. It kept that promise for people who had an anywhere. For a website that only ever published to itself, it was mostly a second language to look after.
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Microsoft Word did not win on the writing
How a profession lost its tools, and what the court record actually says
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What happened to DITA, the standard named after Darwin?
A standard named after the one feature its own advocates tell you to avoid
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What happened to the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web was going to let machines understand pages. What arrived instead was structured data for search engines
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A search engine made of paper
Paul Otlet built one in 1895, out of index cards