Class 11 - World Wide Web / FYI on “What is the Internet?”
RFC as koan
- E. Krol & E. Hoffman, RFC 1462: FYI on “What is the Internet?” (May 1993)
Emulator as koan
Themes
- The WWW
- web standards
- IETF, W3C
- hyperlinks
Prompts
- How did a portal for physics papers end up as all of this?
- How have standards shaped the web?
- What is the internet for (then and now)?
Description
Episodes: - S3E9 “NIM”, S3E10 “NeXT”
As better articulated by Jason Kottke in his essay/review, WWW: The Way We Were, it’s during these two episodes that the main characters discover the potential of the web – “the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending.” Class #10 focuses on that awe and glory, while this class can focus on the work and pieces that fell into place for the web to become the thing that we know it is today.
The characters have a strong business mindset, focused on how to monetize this technology, but the history behind the world wide web is based on public funding, academic research, and noncommercial goals for communication.
Readings
- Anne Helmond, A historiography of the hyperlink: Periodizing the web through thechanging role of the hyperlink (2018)
- Cory Doctorow, What the Internet is For (November 2018)
- Richard Wiggins, Al Gore and the creation of the Internet (October 2000)
- Megan Sapnar Ankerson, Celebrating 25 years of Global Hypertext: World Wide Web! (March 2014)
- David Weinberger, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: Preface (2002)
- Zack Bloom, The Languages Which Almost Became CSS (August 2017)
- Paul Ford, The Group That Rules the Web (Nov 2014)
- Dariuz Kazemi, The land before modern APIs (August 2020)