Transcript

Jen

Hello. So this is the Web Ahead and you just downloaded and started listening to episode 34, but this is not really a real episode. This is not — I mean, it will be number 34 forever and always, the next episode will be 35 — but this is not going to be a regular episode.

This is an announcement, this is a special announcement and here, today, doing the special announcement with me is Eric Meyer. Hi Eric.

Eric

Hey there, how are you doing Jen?

Jen

You were on episode 18, back in March

Eric

Wow, so long ago

Jen

I know, now we are up to 34

Eric

It's crazy

Jen

And that was two hours long. It was like and extra double thick all about CSS

Eric

Yeah.

Jen

And we started to talk about the past while we were talking about CSS

Eric

Yep, that's true

Jen

And that got us thinking, got you thinking, got us, you know, me thinking… So, do you want to announce it, want me to announce it? Or…

Eric

I'll go for it.

So, Jen and I are going to, in conjunction with each other, do a web history podcast as part of The Web Ahead which we are calling The Web Behind.

The idea being that we'll get people on who were very instrumental in the way the web developed and talk to them. Find what they remember about decisions that were made, developments that came out, why the web went in one direction instead of the other. And, in a lot of cases (hopefully), about their own role in that.

[We will] start to build up an archive of information about how we got to where we are now. Because, it's interesting, you spend long enough in a community, I think, and you start to see cycles develop. I think that has happened for me, but the people who haven't been in the community that long don't see the cycles, right. They seem new — even though we might think, yeah, we've been here before and we've had this argument before, maybe with not this exact words. We face this decision.

And to hear about those, I think, is of great interest, it is certainly of interest to me. I have a bachelor of art in history, that´s what my college degree is, is history. Obviously is a passion for me, but… I started to liken it to the book The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage which I go on a great length on any chance I get because I love the book so much, and that book is a look at the telegraph system, how it developed, how it changed society and how it changed the world. A lot of the things described in that book all happened with the internet. We have this really long historical cycles, sort of recurring themes… We're not going to go back that far. We're only going back, you know, through the web probably and maybe slightly before. We'll see.

We talked about this when I was on The Web Ahead and I did started thinking about it and then, once I decided, alright… I think the way to tackle this, the way to get this stories and sort of start to collect them, the best to tackled this is just to interview people. It is a lot easier than trying to get people to write articles and do written interviews. It is, usually, a lot easier to get someone on the phone or the internet and talk to them. And so I was thinking, ok, I'm going to do a podcast — I've done radio, but I've never done a podcast — how am I going to make this right? I don't even know what I don't know yet. So I emailed you, Jen, to say "hey, I'm thinking about doing this. What is your advice for someone who is starting in podcasting?" That's when you —

Jen

— I was like: "Wait! Don't start your own!" Because I feel like you just described. I started making the web fairly early, although also fairly late, but I feel like I know a lot of what I know now because I'm at it for fifteen years — I missed the first five or six years — and I wasn't involved with the community groups or on the listservs, I don't know the people who invented it, yet I feel like sort of watching from the sidelines and learning things as we went, and oh yeah i'm learning table based markup, oh look there's this amazing book by someone named something Zeldman, that's good. I understand what I understand at this point because of having seen things change across the past and I think about that a lot, when I think about new stuff, upcoming stuff. And teaching people, and explaining to people why is thinking about your content as an API is a good idea for mobile. Didn't we already had this conversation when we talked about Web Standards, separating markup and content, and visual look and feel when we started using CSS, and why?

I feel like going back in time is also really valuable as well as going forward in time and being able to explain to people just more and more juicy stories and technical information about what is it this thing, the Web? What is it actually, as a medium? Where did it came from? And why is it wacky? Why does it work and why does it not work? It's human, it's like a super-human… it no super-human, it is a very human endeavor that created this thing that we call the Web that's changing humanity so deeply, and I'm really looking forward to it. I think it will be really fun and amazing, and I'm honored to be doing it with you, to, kind of, go back and find the people who invented a lot of this pieces of the technology or had a strong influence, or where there when it happened and find out exactly what happened.

Eric

Yeah, the first thing I thought when I got that email, when you responded to my email, you said "I was thinking about doing exactly the same thing", right? We had both sort of come to the same place and that is how, you know, it just made sense to work together. Because we both, we discovered, have a real interest in, sort of, the back story.

Jen

Yeah, I was making, I have this long list of all this potential guests and potential topics, and then I kind of hunt for people to fill in topics and I was thinking for people in the past and…

Eric

So, the idea is, like we said, we'll find people and get them on who, maybe, listeners have never heard of before. Or maybe they have heard of but, you know, haven't considered in that context. The Web is, like a lot of our society, is very immediate, is very much in the now and we don't tend to think of how did we get here. You can look at one aspect of society that you don't normally examine and stop and wonder wait, why is it we do thing that way and not a different way?. And the Web is exactly the same, you know, we look at images on the Web and very few people ever stop to think how come we use the IMG tag? Why that? Why did we use that markup pattern instead of a different one?. There's actually a story there, which we're not going to tell right now, but there's a story as to why that's the case that the IMG tag with a SRC is the way you get images on the web and not some more generic markup approach.

To talk to people who we involved in decisions like that. To people who came up with DOCTYPE switching and implemented it, and standard versus quirks.

To talk about why those things had to be done and also what the after effects were, right? Just because you solved a problem doesn't mean that therefore you've solved all future problems. And sometimes our solutions cause new problems — in fact somewhat often. To start to trace those threads, I think, is a major goal of the project —

Jen

Yeah.

Eric

— as I see it. There are certainly certain turning points that we'll probably end up examine from multiple angles and I think that it's just as valuable to talk about. To talk to the various people who helped found the Web Standards Project and get all of their perspectives on why they did that, and see they're the same and how they differ, what they think as happened in the meantime — good or bad.

Jen

Because part of the goal, I guess, with this is to create an archive of first person research accounts of what happened and kind of get it down for posterity sake, get it officially documented in some place.

Because I think we end up, you know, a lot of the people that I know, the sort of famous people, the people of which you are one — it is crazy that I'm even here talking to you, Eric Meyer — is the people who wrote books, who wrote some great CSS books or HTML books, or whatever books. But there's all this other people who didn't write books and they also contributed or perhaps they even contributed more in certain ways, and the only way to understand what happened is either you we there or you, I guess, go back and read hundreds of thousands of emails.

Eric

Not to mention usenet threads, because there was a lot of discussion, a lot of early discussion of stylesheets happened on the usenet group comp.infosystems.wwwauthoringstylesheets or was on the www-style mailing list

Jen

[Joking.] And of course that's what anybody listening to this show is going to do, is going back to usenet and browse.

Eric

Really? Because Google groups has just the greatest GUI for that.

Jen

Yeah, I think it will be great. I've tried to do some research on my own to understand more of the real history of the web, Tim Berners-Lee has a book out that he wrote, and there are a couple of books that seem to be written maybe by a professor or someone who is doing a light, you know, oh, the web is a thing that you use with computers. There're some kids books out, but I haven't really found good, solid, you know… If you want to research the history of the car, the invention of the car or the invention of the telephone there're all these books, not many, but usually you can find some kind of deep, thick research that is easy to read. I don't know, maybe there are books people can email me and tell me, but I have a hard time finding really great history books about the Web.

Eric

There are other efforts along this lines. The W3C recently started a Web history community group where people started very slowly bring together materials. You know, somebody says oh, hey, here's the first flyer that ever mentioned the World Wide Web, here's a scan of it that we found. Or the, recently there was the, I forget who published the article, but it was of the first image ever posted on the Web, right, and it was of cross-dressers, but whatever.

I think of this in a way, hopefully, between the Web community and this podcast, as a way to really get a jumpstart on an archive for the Web as the folklore.org is for the Macintosh community and the Apple community. There's great stuff on Folklore and a lot of it, you get a real sense for how, for example, the Macintosh was developed, like the people who worked on it, the kind of crazy stuff they did, why they did this and not that.

Along those line there was an article recently, somebody pointed to, it was written by the guy who created the graphing calculator for OS X, or OS 9. Graphing calculator is amazing, right? So he wrote up this all story of how it came to be, which is basically he did it for free after being let go from Apple, but while still having access to Apple.

Jen

He got fired, I guess, and other people, and they kept sneaking back into the building against the rules and wrote all this software until it was really awesome and then they ended up getting it into the operating system before it shipped.

Eric

So, you know, those sorts of stories keep coming up. Lou Montulli, recently or relatively recently, but in the last year wrote a short article about the origin of the blink tag. Everyone roll their eyes about blink tag and yet very few people, probably, ever stopped to ask ho did that even get… who was at the committee meting that said we approve a blink tag, let's implement that. As it turns out there wasn't one, it was a drunk night of coding. I mean, Lou wasn't the one doing the drunken coding, but that's what happened. So, just start to collect those and bring those together, and get new perspectives, that's my goal for all of us. So we're starting next week, correct?

Jen

Yes, we're going to do this Web Behind every other week-ish.

Eric

-ish.

Jen

-ish, starting next week. Next week we are going to have our first guest for The Web Behind and then we'll do another one two weeks after that and two weeks after that. Meanwhile, The Web Ahead will continue to have the same kinds of guests and the same kinds of topics we've had for the last year which, by the way, this week is the one year anniversary of this podcast starting, The Web Ahead.

Eric

Awesome, well congratulations.

Jen

Thanks, just did 33 episodes in a year, not 52, but it's been a year so it's kind of nice to add The Web Behind to The Web Ahead at the one year mark. But The Web Ahead is still be around, we'll still continue maybe we'll do this forever, maybe will do this just for the Fall, we're just going to let it evolve and see where it goes and people definitely feel free to email, you can go to 5by5.tv/contact and send an email to me, and I'll forward the ones that make sense to Eric if Eric wants to see them and let's us know what you think or whatever you want to say.

Eric

Our first guest next is schedule to be John Allsopp of long and storied fame. We'll get into what he has done, next week, but he's been a part of CSS and web standards for many years now and has seen a lot so I'm super excited to have him on as a first guest.

Jen

It makes me nervous, it'll be fun. People can listen live, we're going to record on Thursday, September 20th in the eastern timezone of the United States at 7 p.m. That may be at a different day and time where you live, likely, it's likely it'll be a different day, perhaps even a different day where you live. If you go to 5by5.tv/schedule you can see the schedule and you can see, where it says The Web Ahead, those are actually episodes that we're recording. I'm actually recording two episodes on the 20th, the later one, the 7 p.m. one, will be John Allsopp. The 10:30 a.m. is going to be Scott Kellum, he's going to come on and talk about SASS and CSS and how to use SASS and preprocessors and Compass, all kinds of groovy stuff like that. I'm recording Scott first, but he'll be episode 36 and come out in two weeks. Then we're going to record episode 35 with John second, later in the day.

Eric

Awesome.

Jen

People can go listen live — Did I said that? 5by5.tv/live. You can listen right in your web browser, you can also, there's and iPhone and iPad app you can download. There's also a Macintosh application that you can download through the Mac App Store. All of that is in the 5by5.tv website and you can check it all out.

You can also go in iTunes, where that radio is, you know, iTunes Radio and look under News, Talk Radio and scroll down past the Ws and see where it says 5by5, you can double click and listen that way.

Meanwhile we are in the chat, we're in IRC, a Freenode IRC channel. If you don't know what that means just go to the website on the live page and there's a chatroom or if you do, open up your favorite IRC and go into the #5by5 channel in Freenode and you can talk to us, send us questions, all that good stuff.

Eric

Awesome.

Jen

What else do we want to say?

Eric

I think that hope we see people next week and I have to say I'am super honored to be a part of this, so thank you for helping to make this possible Jen, I really appreciate it.

Jen

I think it's going to be really cool.

Eric

Yep

Jen

I guess that's it. This is very informal, it's very weird. I usually try to keep to a structure and

Eric

Now we don't have one.

Jen

Now my brain is going ways. Is there anything else we have …? Twitter, that's what I was going to say. People can follow you on twitter @meyerweb, they can follow me on twitter @jensimmons, they can follow The Web Ahead on twitter @thewebahead, and we will be posting updates like who else is going to be the next guest or if you are wondering what's up you can tweet at me and I will answer you and go oh, yeah, i should tell everybody and I'll go put some tweets out, announcements about the show and what's coming up in the future.

So, keep in touch, send us email and subscribe in iTunes, if you haven't subscribe, subscribe so you can get this automatically.

Eric

Yes, sign up. It will be awesome.

Jen

It will be awesome.