The IT/Systems Operations team has the dual function of developing and supporting the technical infrastructure required to enable and operate the work of our consortium, and the tools and environments that enable participation from around the world to contribute to our technical program.
In this series, we focus on communicating incremental improvements to our tooling.
W3C’s archives of the www-talk mailing list have long been missing some of the earliest messages sent to the list.
In particular, the archives from 1993 through February 1995 were missing due to the lack of a reliable copy of the source messages. There were many partial copies in various places but each of them had bugs and idiosyncrasies, and many were in formats that could not be understood by our archive software.
At long last we have filled this gap in our archives after analyzing and combining the partial copies, reformatting them as needed. Once we had a coherent copy of the source messages we regenerated our web archive and added redirects to make sure no existing links would be broken.
This time period was an exciting and consequential time in the early history of the Web, so we are delighted that these messages now have a stable home on our site.
Some notable early threads include:
- WorldWideWeb mailing list: Introduction: Sir Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL) announces the www-interest and www-talk mailing lists, the first public mailing lists for the World Wide Web.
- Motif browser status: TimBL adds Dan Connolly to the www-talk list and encourages Convex to release their code under a public license.
- WorldWideWeb news: New software includes Gopher, News, Telnet access: “What’s new in ’92”: the state of W3 software, including the new browsers and servers.
- HTML DTD enclosed: Dan Connolly posts an HTML DTD, a step toward formalising HTML.
- Presidential Campaign information: Presidential campaign information on the Web: an early look at political content on a W3 server.
- MidasWWW – Motif based WWW browser now available.: First public release of MidasWWW, a Motif/X browser from SLAC.
- Visiting CERN to work with the World-Wide Web: TimBL asks the community for help with development at CERN.
- Lynx: TimBL’s reaction to Lynx: “very nice, but is it WWW?”
- QueryForms and Input tag: Dave Raggett proposes additions to the queryform and INPUT tag, an early step toward HTML forms.
- NCSA X Mosaic 0.5 released: Marc Andreessen releases NCSA X Mosaic 0.5, the first Mosaic release.
- proposed new tag: IMG: Marc Andreessen proposes the IMG tag, bringing inline images to HTML.
- Plans for cello MS-Windows client: Thomas Bruce explains the plans for Cello, an early Windows browser.
- Guido van Rossum writes a web robot that “tries to map out the entire web”, distributed along with python 0.9.8.
- NCSA Mosaic 1.0 released: NCSA Mosaic 1.0 for X released.
- PUBLIC DOMAIN CERN WWW SOFTWARE: CERN’s declaration that the WWW software is in the public domain.
- WWW usage: Early discussion of WWW usage statistics and usage tracking.
- WWW robots should be identified: Steve Putz asks that web robots identify themselves, an early robot-etiquette thread.
- WWWWW Notes: Tony Sanders’s notes from the WWW workshop (WWWWW), which discussed having a consortium oversee WWW development.
- WWW Security Hole: Marc VanHeyningen’s WWW security hole report and the discussion that followed.
- WWW usage stats: Tony Sanders reports requests from 2,267 distinct IP addresses and asks for NCSA and CERN numbers.
- request for new forms submission consensus: Marc Andreessen asks for consensus on submitting forms through HTTP/1.0.
- First URI meeting notes: TimBL summarises the first URI working group meeting, including why agreement was hard.
- NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 available: NCSA Mosaic for X 2.0 released.
- revised CGI/1.0 specification: Rob McCool’s revised CGI/1.0 specification.
- RFC: Multi-Owner Maintenance robot (MOMspider): Roy Fielding requests comments on MOMspider, a multi-owner maintenance robot.
- NCSA httpd 1.0: NCSA httpd 1.0, the first non-alpha release.
- Style Sheets for HTML: Early discussion of adding style sheets to HTML.
- ANNOUNCE: Best of the Web ’94!: Best of the Web ’94 awards.
- ANNOUNCE: A Standard for Robot Exclusion: Martijn Koster announces the standard for robot exclusion, the robots.txt file.
- Relative popularity of browsers: Brian Behlendorf’s tally of User-Agent strings from 20,800 connections to Wired’s home page.
- Mosaic Netscape is out the door: Marc Andreessen announces Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta.
- Arena 0.91 available: Announcement of Arena 0.91, “the HTML3 browser from W3O”.
- info on proposed SSL protocol and Netscape implementation: Marc Andreessen publishes the proposed SSL protocol spec.
- Network Abuse by Netscape?: Controversy when Netscape starts making parallel requests for page contents.
- Re: Requesting URLs: Roy Fielding points to Yahoo, which then had 22,837 entries.
- Hot Java is here! And it *rocks*: Simon Spero on the first public HotJava release.
- Apache Server Announcement: Brian Behlendorf announces the Apache server, based on patches to NCSA httpd 1.3.
- Session-Id vs. Cookies: Session IDs versus cookies, an early state-management discussion.
The first message to www-talk was sent 35 years ago today. Happy thirty-fifth birthday, www-talk!
Please browse these archives and share your favorite finds with hashtag #wwwtalk35