30 april 1993: the free and open WWW started…
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/03
This year, the Dutch Queens day this year had a special nature. On the nation level: the abdication by former Queen, now Princess Beatrix, and the succession and inauguration of King Willem-Alexander. On the marching band level: Adest Musica had their Dutch premiere of the new show Mother Earth which will be their entry during the quadrennial Word Music Concours this summer. On the personal level, my best friend visiting The Netherlands for just a few days, so finally a chance to catch up in person.
So I totally missed another important historic event: the 20th birthday of the releasing the WWW source code in the public domain.
On the 30st of April 1993, CERN:
- announced the WWW protocols were to become free.
- published the source code of the library, clients and servers.
On the 30st of April 2013, CERN started to celebrate 20 years of a free and open web and:
- restored the first WWW page (here at the W3C archive) to the URL it was originally published on: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
- published the original announcement document that set the WWW in the public domain
- started a history project at http://first-website.web.cern.ch
Note that if you use tools like KB SSL enforcer to force http for certain sites, you need to exclude the first-website.web.cern.ch for https enforcement: since https did not exist back then, CERN will add a login dialog if you force https.
One of the fun things about that first page: it makes use of DL / DT / DD tags that now are virtually extinct (but still supported in HTML 5).
–jeroen
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