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CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

worldwideweb.cern.ch

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#11

Really cool! The illusion broke when emoji could be rendered correctly, I think the original interface could not even render basic utf8.

I could be wrong but I remember a point in my career where using utf8 for HTML documents was a new and shiny thing.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#12
post #2

It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards. 2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics. Text labels on menus and buttons i…

The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated.

And the column-based file browser never appealed to me.

I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#13
A bit more information about the typeface created for this project, which is open source: https://github.com/djrrb/CERN-www-fonts/blob/master/README.m...

(The type world being a small one, this design had assistance from David Jonathan Ross, the designer of the Input coding typeface)

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#15

It took me a minute to figure out that I needed to properly type in the URL of a website.

Funny how for a while (back in the days) URLs in the offline world had "http://" before the "www", when (IMO) "www" and ".com" at the end would have been enough to tell people that it's a website URL, and modern browsers of the day were clever enough anyway to be able to load URLs entered without the protocol. Tragically nowadays marketers have replaced the URL with (facebook logo)/(their page URL on Facebook), or just "Search for $keyword", knowing they've done enough SEO work (or paid Google/Bing enough?) to make that $keyword the 1st search/ad result.

Which returns full circle to "AOL keywords"...

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#16
post #2

It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards. 2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics. Text labels on menus and buttons i…

The first few versions of OS X were more NeXT-like. They felt dated. And the column-based file browser never appealed to me. I do agree that a high-res black and white screen is so much better for text related tasks than what we had back then in PC land. 640x480x16 colors was a mess. Worked fine for things like CAD but kind of gross to type documents on.

I remember paying $129 for Mac OS X 10.0 and it didn't feel anything like NeXT.

On a supposedly state of the art Mac G4, it ran like a lobotomized sloth mostly because of the heavy new graphics stack. The giant fonts, translucent titlebars, pinstripe patterns and "lickable" candy color buttons were the aesthetic opposite of the 2-bit original NeXT.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#17

Wow, the internet was fast back then.

I wonder how slow the actual one was

Ironically (and anecdotally) I remember pages loading much more slowly back then than now, on average. People comparing the two need to remember just how much faster and better optimized computers are now, as well as the speed of broadband versus dialup.

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#19
post #10

There is some kind of easter egg when you click the white circle in the footer it opens this image https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/images/wow.jpg Some meme I don't know about?

That is a photo of Jeremy Keith [https://adactio.com] who was part of the team involved in this effort: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/colophon/

Re: CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild

#20
post #2

It's interesting to use the original NeXT interface after all these years. Honestly I feel I could be very happy with a modern desktop that stuck to the NeXT principles, just updated text rendering to modern standards. 2-bit greyscale is good enough for UI widgets, especially now that we have high-DPI displays and don't necessarily need edge antialiasing anymore for vector graphics. Text labels on menus and buttons i…

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