REtW 6

{"name":"Reverse Engineer the Web 6","description":"The history of the Web.","photo":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dzv7hjwfn/image/upload/lq3szmemmurspvpyhkvp","view_count":9,"fork_count":0,"expires_at":null,"created_at":"2025-08-06T08:44:36.668419Z","updated_at":"2025-08-06T08:44:36.668420Z","user_id":246,"status":"DELETED","parent_id":null,"id":1664,"user":{"photo":null,"email":"kristen@recess.gg","recess_id":"c4ad84f6-113d-480b-bc29-80549518b3ee","created_at":"2024-10-31T20:27:47.342142Z","reset_token":null,"stripe_customer_id":null,"seats":null,"username":"chicothedog","id":246,"password_hash":"$2b$12$QgZsBBZ/7CFyOhVkfVhTNeoe4jAY.pIJOieTXeg0HWS23ZcCpiAeO","updated_at":"2024-10-31T20:27:47.342148Z","reset_token_expiry":null,"subscription_status":null},"code":{"script.js":"/*\n\nReverse Engineer the Web Week 6\n\nInstead of coding today, we are going to learn some history. The history of the Web.\n\nThe World Wide Web.\n\nWe are still on the World Wide Web -- that's the \"www.\" before every website.\n\nBefore the WWW, computers could share information with each other (look up ARPANet), but there was not a standardized system — a \"protocol\" — that linked systems together. Email existed, but there were no public Web pages.\n\nScientist in California might have their own way to transmit information between computers, and nerds in Switzerland might have another...but they couldn't communicate with each other. (Look up \"packet switching\" to get a sense of how computers send data back and forth.)\n\nThis was the state of affairs through the 1980s. Back then, computers could perform some powerful operations — fast math, scientific simulations, a little bit of graphics and sound (Pac-Man came out in 1980) — but nothing on the level we have now.\n\n~ ~ ~\n\nTim Berners-Lee, the hero of our course, worked at CERN (Nuclear Research Facility in Switzerland) at this time and faced the frustration of computers not being able to talk to each other. He wanted a system that meant any CERN computer could communicate with any other CERN computer to share documents and calculations. This was important for client machines to talk to servers (the bigger powerful computers); a scientist might run a heavy computation on a supercomputer off in a cold room, but then she would need to get the results of that computation! Or a scientist could write up instructions for some process — how and where should he \"post\" those instructions? What's the digital equivalent of the office bulletin board?\n\nThe big idea that lit the fuse of the Web was *hypertext*. That's what \"HT\" in \"HTML\" stands for! Hypertext just means text with links to other text and other places. We take it for granted but it was a big idea back then! In 1989 Mr. Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE, a network of pages (then called \"cards\") of hypertext, meaning that every page linked to another page. You could click around and find information *on a network*.\n\nHypertext plus Internet connection made the Web. Berners-Lee and other scientists developed HTML and HTTP (the client-server protocol through which your computer retrieves information from Web Servers), then set up servers and sites. The networking tools of ENQUIRE were made public and the World Wide Web was born in early 1991.\n\n~ ~ ~\n\nWhat was that early Web like? Think back to a couple weeks to our HTML-only pages. You could display text and format it into headers, paragraphs, and lists, and of course you could link other pages — that was the whole point. But you couldn't do much more than that. It was possible to display a picture, but a picture is worth a thousand words and that is true for the amount of data it requires too. Young people will never know the pain of waiting a minute or two for an image to load, one row of pixels at a time — a megabyte felt \"mega\" back then!\n\nCSS was invented in 1996 and that made sizing, colors, and formatting easier and more powerful. But still, hypertext reigned supreme, with a few (low-res) images here and there when you could afford them.\n\nThis version of the Web — what we now call \"Web 1.0\" — lasted through the 1990s til about 2004.\n\nCheck out these sites, which have survived to this day. They give you an idea of what surfin' the net was like back in the day.\n\nhttps://www.spacejam.com/1996/index2.html\nhttps://www.heavensgate.com\nhttp://www.hiking.com.hk\n(If you're interested in modern a game _about_ browsing the old Web, check out Hypnospace Outlaw — https://www.hypnospace.net — it's great.)\n\n~ ~ ~\n\nWas it boring? Not at all! Reading is fun, and clicking through links makes reading even more fun. The simple styling added an aesthetic and expressive layer that sweetened the experience even further.\n\nThe essence of Web 1.0 is *static* pages, as opposed to dynamic pages that change based on your actions. On Web 1.0, when you load a page, what you see is what you get, until you load a new page. JavaScript wouldn't exist until 1995 and either way, there wasn't enough bandwidth to load videos or compute sensitive interactive elements. \n\nNotice on the sites I sent: no pop-ups, no menus, no bubbles or widgets flying around...it's just formatted hypertext and simple visuals. The two main actions are \"read\" and \"link\".\n\nWhat do you think? Does this feel like ancient boring history? Is there anything you like about that old web and its static pages?\n\n~ ~ ~\n\nIn the early 2000s, computers were faster and development tools were more powerful. JavaScript had come out in 1995. Home users switched from \"dial-up\" Internet, which connected through a phone line, to \"broadband\" Internet, which was faster and didn't compete with the phone. (Families used to have landline telephones, and indeed, you couldn't make calls while someone in the house was browsing the Web!)\n\nSo-called \"Web 2.0\" marks a shift from *static* content to *dynamic*, i.e. changing content. Think about what happened when we introduced JavaScript after two weeks of just HTML and CSS. Images could appear and dissapear, spin and flip with user input...you could switch between a weather app and an audio app with the click of a button, all on the same page. It's a totally different Web experience, with its own pluses and minuses.\n\nWhat are som advantages of Web 2.0 over Web 1.0? What are some disadvantages — either annoyances or functional difficulties?\n\nHow would you answer those questions as a programmer rather than just a user?\n\n~ ~ ~\n\nThe Web of today is the Web you grew up on: Web 2.0, dominated by interactive JavaScript elements and pages that transform as you use them. That's part of what makes addictive social media possible. You can hang out an facebook.com or whatever all day, letting the \"feed\" drip into your digital mouth. The Facebook algorithm will keep replacing the text and images you see over a familiar background. It will even slip in some ads so that you can browse \"for free.\"\n\nIn a vacuum, interactive JavaScript-based sites seem like a strict upgrade to the static web of the past. But older people lament the new Web and yearn for its ancestor. Why?\n\nOne reason is *less manipulation*. How is it possible that every popular site is free to use? Well, it's not really free. *You* are the product. That is scary — I agree. Gigantic corporations try to figure out who you are based on your user data and then target specific advertisements to you. Other companies pay for those ads and that keeps the sites \"free.\" But your time and attention are valuable. If something is worth spending time and energy on, it's also worth spending money on.\n\nMy plea, as an old person, to you, a young person:\n*Hold on to your humanity.*\nWhat makes you human is your strength to make choices and to think for yourself. Don't let the Internet take that away from you.\n\nIt is better to search for something rather than just let \"the algorithm\" spit more and more at you.\n\nIt is better to pay for things you value than to treat everything as free and disposable at the cost of sitting through ads.\n\nIt is better to have conversations with your friends instead of posting publicly to show how great you are.\n\nThe Web doesn't have to be good and it doesn't have to be bad. It's up to people like you, who build technology, to steer it in the direction you want. You are up against huge and powerful forces that want to squeeze every penny and every second out of people. But you have brains — can't beat that.\n\nBe smart with the way you use the Internet. If and when you are programming/designing on the Web, be smart and kind — help users hold onto their humanity and don't manipulate them for profit. Give credit and respect where it's due. Be good!\n\n~ ~ ~\n\nWhat's next?\nWe are not yet in \"Web 3.0\" because the JavaScript-dominated ecosystem remains; the online experience has been pretty consistent for the last decade-and-a-half.\n\nSome commentators hypothesize Web 3.0 as a shift towards *decentralization* — a big word that is the opposite of *centralization*. What does that mean?\n\nRight now, the Web is centralized around a handful of major companies/sites. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta control almost everything online. That was not the case in Web 1.0, where each site was its own little island.\n\nThe dream of decentralization is to wrest control from these corporations and empower individual users. Many would prefer their whole lives of data to not be living on an Amazon or Meta server. Many would prefer their data not to be sold to advertisers or OpenAI, especially if they don't get a cut of the sale.\n\nWill Web 2.0 give way to Web 3.0? Who knows?\nIf you're curious to learn more, the biggest new technologicy powering the dream of decentralization is *Blockchain*. Blockchain is a public digital *ledger* that records transactions between people. Then computers aroudn the world solve giant math problems as a way to verify those transactions so that nobody can get away with a fraudelent transaction. That set up is enough to establish a hard digital currency called *Bitcoin* which was the first technology to use Blockchain. But since Bitcoin's creation in 2009, countless other applications have arisen so that some technologists do indeed believe that blockchain will rule Web 3.0, whatever it ends up being, as opposed to the big centralized servers of today.\n\nWe will see! The battle for the future rages on.\n\nWhat do you think? What does the best version of the future Web look like? Will you have a role in building it??\n\n\n\n////////////\nExtra Resources:\n\nMark Miller's answer to \"What did browsing look like before WWW?\" from Quora:\n(https://www.quora.com/What-did-browsing-the-ARPANET-look-like-before-1991-or-the-World-Wide-Web)\n\nJaron Lanier's delightfully ugly \"1.0-ish\" homepage: https://www.jaronlanier.com\nThis guy is a great author on the topic of computers and the Internet — he is a Silicon Valley OG computer scientist who diagonses the problem's of today's Internet.\n\nVideo on how blockchain/Bitcoin works:\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4\n\n///////////\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n*/","style.css":"","index.html":"\n\n\n\n \n \n REtW 6\n \n\n\n\n Just read the code file today!\n\n\n"},"chat_history":[],"assets":[{"project_id":1664,"creator":null,"cloudinary_id":"sqx6smjc8ww8bnuywzgs","deleted":false,"id":72527,"created_at":"2025-04-21T17:08:00.975115Z","name":"tim_BL","resource_type":"image","tags":null}],"messages_sent":0,"comments":[{"content":".","id":1301,"user_id":817,"user":{"photo":null,"email":"","recess_id":null,"created_at":"2025-10-08T03:48:12.389275Z","reset_token":null,"stripe_customer_id":"cus_TCClLqMnGBDKkC","seats":0,"username":"constantinelevin","id":817,"password_hash":"djghfsdfjkghds","updated_at":"2025-10-08T03:48:12.389282Z","reset_token_expiry":null,"subscription_status":"canceled"},"project_id":1664,"created_at":"2025-10-08T03:56:23.427450Z","updated_at":"2025-10-08T03:56:23.427452Z"}],"steps":[]}