The Web Behind
The Web Behind is a series within the series where we take a look back at where the web came from, and the people who made it.
Episode 100 Designing the Web with Jeffrey Zeldman
March 18, 2015
For episode 100 of The Web Ahead, we have Jeffrey Zeldman, the Godfather of Web Standards (or Web Design, depending on who you ask), to talk about the past, present and future of making things for the web. We debate the pros and cons of everything from parallax scrolling to data mining.
In This Episode
- How the web standards movement changed web design forever
- What are the current web design trends? What's next?
- What lessons have we learned as an industry, doing things in a way that turned out to be a bad idea? What anti-patterns should we be avoiding?
- How do we create great, even innovative design for the project on which we are working, and not chase empty trends?
- Form v. function
- How do we keep up?
- How does one create great web design?
- Are we thinking carefully about the kind of world we are creating with the work we design?
- What are the harder conversations that we should be having?
- What's the downside, and responsibility, of big data?
Episode 97 Archiving The Internet with Jason Scott
February 27, 2015
The Internet Archive is a treasure trove of digitized culture — films, software, audio, websites and more. How it it being collected, and how might the Internet Archive be our best hope for preserving the history of this era, as we invent the web? Jason Scott joins Jen Simmons to talk about the challenges of archiving in the digital age.
In This Episode
- The strange collection of digital things that is the Internet Archive
- What will it take to save website from disappearing long-term?
- How do certain sites get saved?
- How can companies or people better preserve our web heritage?
- How digital files degrade faster and have a shorter shelf life than older forms of media.
- How that affects archiving, and increases the need to preserve as much as possible, so that later, when humanity is able to determine what is important to still have, the files do exist and are accessible.
Episode 85 Relaunching The Early Web with Dan Noyes
October 1, 2014
The web was invented at CERN 25 years ago. To mark the anniversary, the web team at CERN has been working on a number of projects, restoring the original website, recreating the first two browsers and documenting the history of the early web. Dan Noyes joins Jen Simmons to tell all about it.
In This Episode
- CERN and the World Wide Web
- The climate in which the web was invented
- Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the web
- How Dan rediscovered the first website
- Recreating the Linemode Browser
- Plans to recreate the WWW browser
Episode 76 The Web Behind: Videoblogging with Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi
July 3, 2014
Ten years ago, a small group started an email list to figure out how to put video on the web. They ended up starting a movement, posting videos, breaking through technical barriers, and inventing a new medium. Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi join host Jen Simmons to tell the story in another edition of The Web Behind.
In This Episode
- How videoblogging got started
- Who participated on the email list
- What is was like to put video on a website in 2003
- The people who first figured this out and why
- Early video file formats and codec settings
- Early collaborative video projects and games
- Key moments that made online video take off
- How the proliferation of video creation and distribution tools has changed society, or not
- The need to archive this history
Episode 48 The Web Behind with Danny Sullivan
February 15, 2013
Danny Sullivan joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for the latest episode in The Web Behind series. Danny reminisces about the early days of web search, directories versus crawlers, the panoply of search engines in the mid-1990s, page counts as serious bragging rights, the brief period when there were search engines that only searched other search engines, the verbing of “Google,” and more.
Episode 47 The Web Behind with Jen Robbins
January 15, 2013
Jen Robbins joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about the early days of web design, O'Reilly, GNN, wrestling with technology and more.
Episode 46 The Web Behind with Tantek Çelik
December 20, 2012
Tantek Çelik joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for another episode in The Web Behind series. They talk about OpenDoc, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, doctype switching, semantic data formats, and much more.
Episode 44 The Web Behind with Tom Bruce
November 28, 2012
Tom Bruce joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about the very earliest days of the web, writing the first Windows web browser, inventing 'marquee', and taking a road trip to NCSA with Tim Berners-Lee.
Episode 43 The Web Behind with Chris Wilson
November 15, 2012
Chris Wilson joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about the origins of the Mosaic Browser and his work on Internet Explorer 3 and 4.
Episode 41 The Web Behind with Molly Holzschlag
November 2, 2012
Molly Holzschlag has been working on the web from the very beginning of its invention. She joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons to talk about those days, and what it was like to be online in the time of BBSes, Gopher, and the text-only web. They discuss accessibility, the blink tag, the Web Standard Project, how Microsoft started embracing web standards and much more.
Episode 39 The Web Behind with Dave Shea
October 17, 2012
Dave Shea joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for the third episode of in The Web Behind series. They talk about the CSS Zen Garden, a website Dave created in 2003 which showed the world how radically-different designs could be with just CSS. Dave also reflects on the origins and lasting effects of the CSS Sprites technique he introduced to the world, and reminisces about the web design community of a decade ago.
Episode 37 The Web Behind with Steven Champeon
October 4, 2012
In this second episode of The Web Behind series with Eric Meyer, guest Steven Champeon talks about predecessors to HTML, the webdesign-L online community, the birth of the web standards project, how he coined the term "progressive enhancement" and much more.
Episode 35 The Web Behind with John Allsopp
September 21, 2012
John Allsopp joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for this first episode in our “web behind” series — a look back at where the web came from and the people who created it. They talk about early web design tools, community groups that shaped the web, thinkers from the mid-20th century who shaped ideas about hypertext, and much more.
