The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application (2019)

worldwideweb.cern.ch

82 pointskarlzt21 comments

Something they missed, which was a feature i found notable when I first used NeXTSTEP, was that all text was selectable, even in dialog boxes; useful for copying and pasting messages, etc. But here in this web app, they seem to have gone out of their way to make all text non-selectable.

I can select text, both on the landing page and in the WorldWideWeb browser. Using Safari on Mac. Are you on mobile?

No, desktop. For example, in the menu, click on Info ▷ / Panel… I can’t select anything in that window, whereas if this was real NeXTSTEP, you’d be able to select any text, even the text with a gray background.

Strange, I can select and copy any text I want there. Same on the gray background. Could be that JS is involved and your browser blocks that somehow.

As mentioned below, this is a webpage styled to look like the WorldWideWeb app, rather than it running in emulation. If you decide to try the latter (Previous is a good way to do it) you’ll find that in recent years servers have stopped responding to WorldWideWeb at all, which is kind of sad. TLS is of course a no-go, but even on plaintext HTTP many servers these days will immediately respond with a 400 and drop the connection if they don’t like what they see. Just a couple years ago I could point WorldWideWeb at my personal website and it would render it mostly coherently, but at some point GitHub Pages decided to stop serving those requests because they don’t have an HTTP version number. I guess it’s just a casualty in the march towards newer web standards as people forget the existence of older browsers.

I believe it lacks the Host: header, which means sites with virtual hosting (the vast majority of them) instead of a specific IP won't work.

It does, but in that case GitHub at least scrapes together a proper 404.

All of the window title bars and the menu title bar are utterly wrong in design and format. What's going on with that? That's not at all how WWW.app looked. Why would this page intentionally change them?

This image appears when clicking on the last white circle on the bottom of the page: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/images/wow.jpg

I am not familiar with the history of the web, maybe someone can comment about who is the person in the image.

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/

[Copied from mxuribe at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263365 ]

Ah good memories--NeXTSTEP looks so clean. I always liked how the keyboard shortcuts merely show a lowercase (for Ctrl+letter) or uppercase letter (for Ctrl+Shift+letter).

⌘ is implied, of course.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373

Along with an assortment of smaller threads:

The Browser – WorldWideWeb Next Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25013103 - Nov 2020 (8 comments)

The Browser – WorldWideWeb NeXT Application - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24955122 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24939929 - Oct 2020 (6 comments)

WorldWideWeb - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19494518 - March 2019 (1 comment)

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373 - Feb 2019 (44 comments)

CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild: 2019 rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19183316 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

What's this? Some sort of 98.css[0] type thing that mimics an oldskool browser's UI? Because the site is vague on what the UI elements are supposed to be for.

[0] hhttps://jdan.github.io/98.css/

Wow. I don't want to be churlish but you should know your internet history. 'WorldWideWeb'[1] was the client application co-developed by Tim Berners-Lee and is the original 'Web Browser'. When you click on the top right button on the linked site, you are shown an interactive copy of WorldWideWeb running on a emulated NextStep[2] desktop.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

Not...quite. It's not an emulated NeXTSTEP desktop or WorldWideWeb itself. It's just a tribute to it. They made a blog post on how they made it a few years ago, if I recall correctly. It's just some UI chrome on top of some Javascript.

I was simplifying. :)

Thank you. I thought that's just an article about the NeXT browser. Now I noticed the button.

> What's this?

From the site:

> In February 2019, in celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the development of WorldWideWeb, a group of developers and designers convened at CERN to rebuild the original browser within a contemporary browser, allowing users around the world to experience the rather humble origins of this transformative technology.

Imitation NeXTSTEP actually, to imitate the original operating system WorldWideWeb was released on.

Your confusion is understandable though and you don’t deserve to be buried for it. Win95 and by extension Win98 and later did take some uh, inspiration, from NeXTSTEP.

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