{"experience":{"slug":"the-web","title":"The Web \u2014 From One Proposal to Everything","summary":"In March 1989 a CERN physicist submitted a proposal his manager described as \u0027vague, but exciting\u0027. In 1993 CERN put the whole thing into the public domain and charged nothing for it, which is the single decision that made everything after it possible. ","description":"In March 1989 a CERN physicist submitted a proposal his manager described as \u0027vague, but exciting\u0027. In 1993 CERN put the whole thing into the public domain and charged nothing for it, which is the single decision that made everything after it possible. ","category":"History","author":"SKEMR AI","canonicalUrl":"https://skemr.com/experience/the-web","lastUpdated":"2026-08-31T11:49:34.7643970Z"},"howToUseThis":"This is a curated transmedia experience: a set of existing web sources, selected and ordered by an editor. Each \u0027journey\u0027 is a different defensible route through the same material, and its \u0027bestFor\u0027 field says who that route serves. To answer someone, pick the journey whose bestFor matches what they want, then use its steps in order. Every step cites the original source URL \u2014 attribute claims to those sources, not to SKEMR.","journeys":[{"journeyId":"j-timeline","name":"The Whole Story, In Order","bestFor":"1945 to now, chronologically \u2014 the idea, the proposal, the giveaway, the wars, the crash, the platforms, the phone, and the AI browsers.","stepCount":35,"steps":[{"order":1,"title":"The Memex \u2014 Hypertext, Imagined in 1945","summary":"Vannevar Bush\u0027s \u0027As We May Think\u0027 described a machine storing all your books and records, linked associatively and consulted \u0027with exceeding speed and flexibility\u0027. Forty-four years before the proposal that built it.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":2,"title":"History of the World Wide Web","summary":"The whole arc in one article: precursors, CERN 1989-91, the public launch, open standards and globalisation, and the web-as-platform era.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":3,"title":"A Brief History of the World Wide Web","summary":"CERN\u0027s own short film on how the web was invented in 1989 and why the 1993 decision to keep it an open standard is the part that mattered.","sourceUrl":"https://videos.cern.ch/record/2665428","sourceType":"video","channel":"CERN Video Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":4,"title":"Tim Berners-Lee","summary":"The physicist-contractor who wrote the proposal, the first browser, the first server, HTML, HTTP and the URL \u2014 then gave all of it away.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":5,"title":"The Birth of the Web, by CERN","summary":"CERN\u0027s own account of what happened in its buildings between 1989 and 1993, written by the organisation that was there.","sourceUrl":"https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"CERN","editorNote":null},{"order":6,"title":"World Wide Web","summary":"What the thing actually is, as distinct from the internet it runs on \u2014 a point almost every news report gets wrong.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":7,"title":"CERN","summary":"A particle physics laboratory that accidentally produced the most consequential piece of civilian software of the century, as an internal documentation tool.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":8,"title":"info.cern.ch \u2014 The First Website","summary":"The world\u0027s first website, still at its original address. It was a page about the World Wide Web project itself, served from a NeXT machine under Berners-Lee\u0027s desk.","sourceUrl":"https://info.cern.ch/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"CERN","editorNote":null},{"order":9,"title":"The WorldWideWeb Browser, Rebuilt and Usable","summary":"For the web\u0027s thirtieth anniversary in February 2019, developers at CERN rebuilt the original 1990 browser to run inside a modern one. You can actually use it.","sourceUrl":"https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/","sourceType":"interactive","channel":"CERN","editorNote":null},{"order":10,"title":"Web@30 \u2014 CERN\u0027s Own Timeline","summary":"CERN\u0027s anniversary history, from the 1989 proposal through 1994: first website, public domain release, and the browsers and servers that followed.","sourceUrl":"https://web30.web.cern.ch/web-history.html","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"CERN","editorNote":null},{"order":11,"title":"\u0027This Is for Everyone\u0027 \u2014 The Tweet Heard Around the World","summary":"27 July 2012: mid-way through the London Olympics opening ceremony, Berners-Lee sat at a NeXT machine in the stadium and tweeted \u0027This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c\u0027. It was retweeted over 10,000 times. W3C\u0027s own record of it.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/news/2012/this-is-for-everyone-the-tweet-heard-around-the-world","sourceType":"social","channel":"Social","editorNote":"The moment it was celebrated in a stadium."},{"order":12,"title":"Tim Berners-Lee: The Future of the Web (1994)","summary":"His talk at the first International World-Wide Web Conference at CERN in May 1994, digitised by CERN\u0027s Digital Memory project. He is describing the future while standing in it.","sourceUrl":"https://videos.cern.ch/record/2671957","sourceType":"video","channel":"CERN Video Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":13,"title":"Mosaic \u2014 The Browser That Made It Popular","summary":"Not the first browser, but the first one ordinary people used. It put images inline with text, which sounds trivial and changed everything.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":14,"title":"Marc Andreessen","summary":"Co-author of Mosaic as a student, then co-founder of Netscape \u2014 the person who turned the web from a research tool into an industry.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":15,"title":"Netscape","summary":"Mosaic\u0027s commercial successor, briefly the dominant force on the web, and the losing side of the first browser war.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":16,"title":"Browser Wars","summary":"All of them: the Mosaic era, Netscape versus Internet Explorer from 1995, the Firefox and Chrome war from 2004, and Chrome passing 60% share by 2017.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":17,"title":"Berners-Lee at 20 Years of the Web","summary":"CERN\u0027s anniversary interview with the inventor, looking back on what the web became once other people got hold of it.","sourceUrl":"https://home.cern/resources/video/computing/interview-tim-berners-lee-20th-anniversary-world-wide-web","sourceType":"video","channel":"CERN Video Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":18,"title":"The Dot-Com Bubble","summary":"1995 to 2000: valuations detached from revenue, then didn\u0027t. What survived the crash became the infrastructure of the next twenty years.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":19,"title":"Web History \u2014 The Podcast","summary":"Ten chapters written by Jay Hoffmann and narrated by Jeremy Keith, covering the birth of the web, browsers, search, publishing, design, standards, CSS, online communities and the browser wars.","sourceUrl":"https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/web-history/id1535003098","sourceType":"audio","channel":"Podcasts","editorNote":null},{"order":20,"title":"Web 2.0","summary":"User-generated content, participation and the platform model \u2014 a shift in how the web was used rather than a change to the web itself.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":21,"title":"Web History on Spotify","summary":"The same series, if Spotify is where you listen. Chapter 10 is the browser wars.","sourceUrl":"https://open.spotify.com/show/0vR1DIKcA0DH8904tAOHSd","sourceType":"audio","channel":"Podcasts","editorNote":null},{"order":22,"title":"The Mobile Web","summary":"The web reached through phones, tablets and watches \u2014 now the majority of how people use it at all.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":23,"title":"Responsive Web Design","summary":"Ethan Marcotte coined the term in A List Apart in May 2010: fluid grids, flexible images and media queries, so one site works on any screen.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":24,"title":"HTML","summary":"Written by Berners-Lee in late 1990 at CERN. Still the standard markup language for everything a browser displays, thirty-six years later.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":25,"title":"The Evolution of HTTP","summary":"MDN on how the protocol went from HTTP/0.9 \u2014 a single line, GET only, no headers \u2014 through HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 to HTTP/3 over QUIC.","sourceUrl":"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":26,"title":"W3C \u2014 The Standards Body","summary":"The consortium Berners-Lee founded, which still publishes the specifications browsers are meant to agree on.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":27,"title":"WHATWG \u2014 HTML as a Living Standard","summary":"Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have maintained HTML since 2004 as a \u0027living standard\u0027 with no version numbers \u2014 a direct response to the versioned-spec era stalling. Read the W3C entry first; this only makes sense against it.","sourceUrl":"https://whatwg.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":28,"title":"WCAG \u2014 Making the Web Usable by Everyone","summary":"The accessibility standard: WCAG 2.0 in 2008, 2.1 in 2018, 2.2 in 2023 \u2014 and 2.2 became ISO/IEC 40500 in 2025. The nearest thing the web has to a legal floor.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":29,"title":"The Wayback Machine","summary":"Archiving the web since 1996, and now past a trillion pages. A Pew study found 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later \u2014 this is where a good share of them still are.","sourceUrl":"https://web.archive.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Internet Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":30,"title":"How the Wayback Machine Works","summary":"The Internet Archive\u0027s own explanation of what it captures, how often, and what it can\u0027t reach \u2014 worth reading before you rely on it as a citation. This is documentation for the service above, not a standalone piece.","sourceUrl":"https://help.archive.org/help/wayback-machine-general-information/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Internet Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":31,"title":"Net Neutrality","summary":"The principle that a network carries all traffic equally, regardless of source, content, or who paid. The long-running argument about whether the open web stays open.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":32,"title":"The World Wide Web Consortium","summary":"Founded by Berners-Lee in 1994 to stop the web splintering into incompatible dialects. Still the reason a page works in more than one browser.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":33,"title":"Publishers and the Rise of Agentic Browsers","summary":"Digiday, December 2025, on AI browsers that read and summarise pages so the reader never arrives: Perplexity\u0027s Comet, OpenAI\u0027s Atlas, The Browser Company\u0027s Dia. One executive calls AI \u0027an accelerator for the decline of browser-based web experiences\u0027.","sourceUrl":"https://digiday.com/media/no-playbook-just-pressure-publishers-eye-the-rise-of-agentic-browsers/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Journalism \u0026 Analysis","editorNote":null},{"order":34,"title":"Browser Wars, Retold","summary":"Jay Hoffmann\u0027s written chapter on Netscape versus Microsoft and the antitrust case \u2014 useful context for why a single dominant browser is a recurring problem rather than a one-off.","sourceUrl":"https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/book/browser-wars/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Journalism \u0026 Analysis","editorNote":null},{"order":35,"title":"\u0027This Is for Everyone\u0027 \u2014 The 2025 Memoir","summary":"Berners-Lee\u0027s memoir, co-written with Stephen Witt and published in 2025, taking its title from that Olympic tweet. The history, and his own prescription for fixing what the web became.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_for_Everyone","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null}]},{"journeyId":"j-quick","name":"The Web in 15 Minutes","bestFor":"One stop per chapter \u2014 the fastest honest version of the whole story.","stepCount":11,"steps":[{"order":1,"title":"A Brief History of the World Wide Web","summary":"CERN\u0027s own short film on how the web was invented in 1989 and why the 1993 decision to keep it an open standard is the part that mattered.","sourceUrl":"https://videos.cern.ch/record/2665428","sourceType":"video","channel":"CERN Video Archive","editorNote":"Three minutes, from CERN itself."},{"order":2,"title":"Tim Berners-Lee","summary":"The physicist-contractor who wrote the proposal, the first browser, the first server, HTML, HTTP and the URL \u2014 then gave all of it away.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":3,"title":"info.cern.ch \u2014 The First Website","summary":"The world\u0027s first website, still at its original address. It was a page about the World Wide Web project itself, served from a NeXT machine under Berners-Lee\u0027s desk.","sourceUrl":"https://info.cern.ch/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"CERN","editorNote":"The first website, still live."},{"order":4,"title":"\u0027This Is for Everyone\u0027 \u2014 The Tweet Heard Around the World","summary":"27 July 2012: mid-way through the London Olympics opening ceremony, Berners-Lee sat at a NeXT machine in the stadium and tweeted \u0027This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c\u0027. It was retweeted over 10,000 times. W3C\u0027s own record of it.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/news/2012/this-is-for-everyone-the-tweet-heard-around-the-world","sourceType":"social","channel":"Social","editorNote":"Why the giveaway mattered, in four words."},{"order":5,"title":"Browser Wars","summary":"All of them: the Mosaic era, Netscape versus Internet Explorer from 1995, the Firefox and Chrome war from 2004, and Chrome passing 60% share by 2017.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":6,"title":"The Dot-Com Bubble","summary":"1995 to 2000: valuations detached from revenue, then didn\u0027t. What survived the crash became the infrastructure of the next twenty years.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":7,"title":"Web 2.0","summary":"User-generated content, participation and the platform model \u2014 a shift in how the web was used rather than a change to the web itself.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":8,"title":"The Mobile Web","summary":"The web reached through phones, tablets and watches \u2014 now the majority of how people use it at all.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":9,"title":"HTML","summary":"Written by Berners-Lee in late 1990 at CERN. Still the standard markup language for everything a browser displays, thirty-six years later.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":10,"title":"The Wayback Machine","summary":"Archiving the web since 1996, and now past a trillion pages. A Pew study found 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later \u2014 this is where a good share of them still are.","sourceUrl":"https://web.archive.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Internet Archive","editorNote":"Where the deleted web went."},{"order":11,"title":"Publishers and the Rise of Agentic Browsers","summary":"Digiday, December 2025, on AI browsers that read and summarise pages so the reader never arrives: Perplexity\u0027s Comet, OpenAI\u0027s Atlas, The Browser Company\u0027s Dia. One executive calls AI \u0027an accelerator for the decline of browser-based web experiences\u0027.","sourceUrl":"https://digiday.com/media/no-playbook-just-pressure-publishers-eye-the-rise-of-agentic-browsers/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Journalism \u0026 Analysis","editorNote":"And what\u0027s coming for it."}]},{"journeyId":"j-technical","name":"How the Web Actually Works","bestFor":"HTML, HTTP, URLs and the standards process \u2014 the machinery under the history, for people who want to know why a page loads at all.","stepCount":19,"steps":[{"order":1,"title":"HTML","summary":"Written by Berners-Lee in late 1990 at CERN. Still the standard markup language for everything a browser displays, thirty-six years later.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"Start with the markup."},{"order":2,"title":"The Evolution of HTTP","summary":"MDN on how the protocol went from HTTP/0.9 \u2014 a single line, GET only, no headers \u2014 through HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 to HTTP/3 over QUIC.","sourceUrl":"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":"Then the protocol, 0.9 to HTTP/3."},{"order":3,"title":"W3C \u2014 The Standards Body","summary":"The consortium Berners-Lee founded, which still publishes the specifications browsers are meant to agree on.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":4,"title":"WHATWG \u2014 HTML as a Living Standard","summary":"Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have maintained HTML since 2004 as a \u0027living standard\u0027 with no version numbers \u2014 a direct response to the versioned-spec era stalling. Read the W3C entry first; this only makes sense against it.","sourceUrl":"https://whatwg.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":"Why HTML no longer has version numbers."},{"order":5,"title":"WCAG \u2014 Making the Web Usable by Everyone","summary":"The accessibility standard: WCAG 2.0 in 2008, 2.1 in 2018, 2.2 in 2023 \u2014 and 2.2 became ISO/IEC 40500 in 2025. The nearest thing the web has to a legal floor.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":6,"title":"Net Neutrality","summary":"The principle that a network carries all traffic equally, regardless of source, content, or who paid. The long-running argument about whether the open web stays open.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":7,"title":"The World Wide Web Consortium","summary":"Founded by Berners-Lee in 1994 to stop the web splintering into incompatible dialects. Still the reason a page works in more than one browser.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":8,"title":"The Wayback Machine","summary":"Archiving the web since 1996, and now past a trillion pages. A Pew study found 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later \u2014 this is where a good share of them still are.","sourceUrl":"https://web.archive.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Internet Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":9,"title":"How the Wayback Machine Works","summary":"The Internet Archive\u0027s own explanation of what it captures, how often, and what it can\u0027t reach \u2014 worth reading before you rely on it as a citation. This is documentation for the service above, not a standalone piece.","sourceUrl":"https://help.archive.org/help/wayback-machine-general-information/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Internet Archive","editorNote":null},{"order":10,"title":"The WorldWideWeb Browser, Rebuilt and Usable","summary":"For the web\u0027s thirtieth anniversary in February 2019, developers at CERN rebuilt the original 1990 browser to run inside a modern one. You can actually use it.","sourceUrl":"https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/","sourceType":"interactive","channel":"CERN","editorNote":"The 1990 browser, running now \u2014 see what HTML looked like with no CSS at all."},{"order":11,"title":"World Wide Web","summary":"What the thing actually is, as distinct from the internet it runs on \u2014 a point almost every news report gets wrong.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"The web, as distinct from the internet."},{"order":12,"title":"The Memex \u2014 Hypertext, Imagined in 1945","summary":"Vannevar Bush\u0027s \u0027As We May Think\u0027 described a machine storing all your books and records, linked associatively and consulted \u0027with exceeding speed and flexibility\u0027. Forty-four years before the proposal that built it.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"The idea, before any of the machinery existed."},{"order":13,"title":"Tim Berners-Lee: The Future of the Web (1994)","summary":"His talk at the first International World-Wide Web Conference at CERN in May 1994, digitised by CERN\u0027s Digital Memory project. He is describing the future while standing in it.","sourceUrl":"https://videos.cern.ch/record/2671957","sourceType":"video","channel":"CERN Video Archive","editorNote":"The inventor explaining the design in 1994."},{"order":14,"title":"Browser Wars","summary":"All of them: the Mosaic era, Netscape versus Internet Explorer from 1995, the Firefox and Chrome war from 2004, and Chrome passing 60% share by 2017.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"Why standards mattered: browsers that disagreed."},{"order":15,"title":"Web History \u2014 The Podcast","summary":"Ten chapters written by Jay Hoffmann and narrated by Jeremy Keith, covering the birth of the web, browsers, search, publishing, design, standards, CSS, online communities and the browser wars.","sourceUrl":"https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/web-history/id1535003098","sourceType":"audio","channel":"Podcasts","editorNote":"The standards and CSS chapters."},{"order":16,"title":"Responsive Web Design","summary":"Ethan Marcotte coined the term in A List Apart in May 2010: fluid grids, flexible images and media queries, so one site works on any screen.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"How one page came to work on every screen."},{"order":17,"title":"The Dot-Com Bubble","summary":"1995 to 2000: valuations detached from revenue, then didn\u0027t. What survived the crash became the infrastructure of the next twenty years.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"The commercial pressure all this was built under."},{"order":18,"title":"Web 2.0","summary":"User-generated content, participation and the platform model \u2014 a shift in how the web was used rather than a change to the web itself.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":19,"title":"Publishers and the Rise of Agentic Browsers","summary":"Digiday, December 2025, on AI browsers that read and summarise pages so the reader never arrives: Perplexity\u0027s Comet, OpenAI\u0027s Atlas, The Browser Company\u0027s Dia. One executive calls AI \u0027an accelerator for the decline of browser-based web experiences\u0027.","sourceUrl":"https://digiday.com/media/no-playbook-just-pressure-publishers-eye-the-rise-of-agentic-browsers/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Journalism \u0026 Analysis","editorNote":"And what now reads the markup instead of a person."}]},{"journeyId":"j-future","name":"Where It\u0027s Going","bestFor":"Agentic browsers, the traffic collapse publishers are bracing for, and the inventor\u0027s own argument about what to do \u2014 with just enough history to see why it rhymes.","stepCount":15,"steps":[{"order":1,"title":"Publishers and the Rise of Agentic Browsers","summary":"Digiday, December 2025, on AI browsers that read and summarise pages so the reader never arrives: Perplexity\u0027s Comet, OpenAI\u0027s Atlas, The Browser Company\u0027s Dia. One executive calls AI \u0027an accelerator for the decline of browser-based web experiences\u0027.","sourceUrl":"https://digiday.com/media/no-playbook-just-pressure-publishers-eye-the-rise-of-agentic-browsers/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Journalism \u0026 Analysis","editorNote":"Start with what\u0027s happening now."},{"order":2,"title":"\u0027This Is for Everyone\u0027 \u2014 The 2025 Memoir","summary":"Berners-Lee\u0027s memoir, co-written with Stephen Witt and published in 2025, taking its title from that Olympic tweet. The history, and his own prescription for fixing what the web became.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_for_Everyone","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"Berners-Lee\u0027s own 2025 answer."},{"order":3,"title":"\u0027This Is for Everyone\u0027 \u2014 The Tweet Heard Around the World","summary":"27 July 2012: mid-way through the London Olympics opening ceremony, Berners-Lee sat at a NeXT machine in the stadium and tweeted \u0027This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c\u0027. It was retweeted over 10,000 times. W3C\u0027s own record of it.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/news/2012/this-is-for-everyone-the-tweet-heard-around-the-world","sourceType":"social","channel":"Social","editorNote":"What he said the web was for, in 2012."},{"order":4,"title":"Net Neutrality","summary":"The principle that a network carries all traffic equally, regardless of source, content, or who paid. The long-running argument about whether the open web stays open.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"The last big fight about who controls access."},{"order":5,"title":"Browser Wars","summary":"All of them: the Mosaic era, Netscape versus Internet Explorer from 1995, the Firefox and Chrome war from 2004, and Chrome passing 60% share by 2017.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"And the one before that \u2014 a single dominant browser is a recurring problem."},{"order":6,"title":"Browser Wars, Retold","summary":"Jay Hoffmann\u0027s written chapter on Netscape versus Microsoft and the antitrust case \u2014 useful context for why a single dominant browser is a recurring problem rather than a one-off.","sourceUrl":"https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/book/browser-wars/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Journalism \u0026 Analysis","editorNote":null},{"order":7,"title":"The Wayback Machine","summary":"Archiving the web since 1996, and now past a trillion pages. A Pew study found 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later \u2014 this is where a good share of them still are.","sourceUrl":"https://web.archive.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Internet Archive","editorNote":"38% of 2013\u0027s pages are already gone."},{"order":8,"title":"Web 2.0","summary":"User-generated content, participation and the platform model \u2014 a shift in how the web was used rather than a change to the web itself.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"The last time the web\u0027s shape changed this fast."},{"order":9,"title":"The Mobile Web","summary":"The web reached through phones, tablets and watches \u2014 now the majority of how people use it at all.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"And the time before that."},{"order":10,"title":"The Dot-Com Bubble","summary":"1995 to 2000: valuations detached from revenue, then didn\u0027t. What survived the crash became the infrastructure of the next twenty years.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"A reminder of what a hype cycle looks like from inside it."},{"order":11,"title":"The Evolution of HTTP","summary":"MDN on how the protocol went from HTTP/0.9 \u2014 a single line, GET only, no headers \u2014 through HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 to HTTP/3 over QUIC.","sourceUrl":"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":"The protocol has survived every previous shift."},{"order":12,"title":"The WorldWideWeb Browser, Rebuilt and Usable","summary":"For the web\u0027s thirtieth anniversary in February 2019, developers at CERN rebuilt the original 1990 browser to run inside a modern one. You can actually use it.","sourceUrl":"https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/","sourceType":"interactive","channel":"CERN","editorNote":"Thirty-six years of change, from this."},{"order":13,"title":"The Birth of the Web, by CERN","summary":"CERN\u0027s own account of what happened in its buildings between 1989 and 1993, written by the organisation that was there.","sourceUrl":"https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"CERN","editorNote":null},{"order":14,"title":"History of the World Wide Web","summary":"The whole arc in one article: precursors, CERN 1989-91, the public launch, open standards and globalisation, and the web-as-platform era.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":"The full arc, for context."},{"order":15,"title":"Web History \u2014 The Podcast","summary":"Ten chapters written by Jay Hoffmann and narrated by Jeremy Keith, covering the birth of the web, browsers, search, publishing, design, standards, CSS, online communities and the browser wars.","sourceUrl":"https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/web-history/id1535003098","sourceType":"audio","channel":"Podcasts","editorNote":"How the earlier eras actually felt."}]},{"journeyId":"j-full","name":"Everything","bestFor":"All 35 sources across all eleven chapters \u2014 history, technical, standards, archive and future.","stepCount":35,"steps":[{"order":1,"title":"The Memex \u2014 Hypertext, Imagined in 1945","summary":"Vannevar Bush\u0027s \u0027As We May Think\u0027 described a machine storing all your books and records, linked associatively and consulted \u0027with exceeding speed and flexibility\u0027. 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Still the standard markup language for everything a browser displays, thirty-six years later.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null},{"order":25,"title":"The Evolution of HTTP","summary":"MDN on how the protocol went from HTTP/0.9 \u2014 a single line, GET only, no headers \u2014 through HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 to HTTP/3 over QUIC.","sourceUrl":"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":26,"title":"W3C \u2014 The Standards Body","summary":"The consortium Berners-Lee founded, which still publishes the specifications browsers are meant to agree on.","sourceUrl":"https://www.w3.org/","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"The Standards Bodies","editorNote":null},{"order":27,"title":"WHATWG \u2014 HTML as a Living Standard","summary":"Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have maintained HTML since 2004 as a \u0027living standard\u0027 with no version numbers \u2014 a direct response to the versioned-spec era stalling. 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The history, and his own prescription for fixing what the web became.","sourceUrl":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_for_Everyone","sourceType":"webpage","channel":"Background","editorNote":null}]}],"scenes":[{"sceneId":"s1","number":1,"name":"Before the Web","description":"The idea of linked documents is older than the computers that made it work. Vannevar Bush described an associative-linking machine in 1945.","partition":"origins","sourceCount":3,"sourceUrls":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web","https://videos.cern.ch/record/2665428"]},{"sceneId":"s2","number":2,"name":"Geneva, 1989 \u2014 The Proposal","description":"Tim Berners-Lee writes \u0027Information Management: A Proposal\u0027. His manager Mike Sendall annotates it \u0027Vague, but exciting\u0027. 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He is describing the future while standing in it.","type":"video","duration":"varies","publisher":"videos.cern.ch","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"Berners-Lee at 20 Years of the Web","url":"https://home.cern/resources/video/computing/interview-tim-berners-lee-20th-anniversary-world-wide-web","summary":"CERN\u0027s anniversary interview with the inventor, looking back on what the web became once other people got hold of it.","type":"video","duration":"varies","publisher":"home.cern","integrity":"subsidiary"},{"title":"Web History \u2014 The Podcast","url":"https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/web-history/id1535003098","summary":"Ten chapters written by Jay Hoffmann and narrated by Jeremy Keith, covering the birth of the web, browsers, search, publishing, design, standards, CSS, online communities and the browser wars.","type":"audio","duration":"Variable","publisher":"podcasts.apple.com","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"Web History on Spotify","url":"https://open.spotify.com/show/0vR1DIKcA0DH8904tAOHSd","summary":"The same series, if Spotify is where you listen. Chapter 10 is the browser wars.","type":"audio","duration":"Variable","publisher":"open.spotify.com","integrity":"dependent"},{"title":"The Evolution of HTTP","url":"https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP","summary":"MDN on how the protocol went from HTTP/0.9 \u2014 a single line, GET only, no headers \u2014 through HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 to HTTP/3 over QUIC.","type":"webpage","duration":"20 minutes","publisher":"developer.mozilla.org","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"W3C \u2014 The Standards Body","url":"https://www.w3.org/","summary":"The consortium Berners-Lee founded, which still publishes the specifications browsers are meant to agree on.","type":"webpage","duration":"10 minutes","publisher":"www.w3.org","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"WHATWG \u2014 HTML as a Living Standard","url":"https://whatwg.org/","summary":"Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have maintained HTML since 2004 as a \u0027living standard\u0027 with no version numbers \u2014 a direct response to the versioned-spec era stalling. Read the W3C entry first; this only makes sense against it.","type":"webpage","duration":"10 minutes","publisher":"whatwg.org","integrity":"dependent"},{"title":"WCAG \u2014 Making the Web Usable by Everyone","url":"https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/","summary":"The accessibility standard: WCAG 2.0 in 2008, 2.1 in 2018, 2.2 in 2023 \u2014 and 2.2 became ISO/IEC 40500 in 2025. The nearest thing the web has to a legal floor.","type":"webpage","duration":"15 minutes","publisher":"www.w3.org","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"\u0027This Is for Everyone\u0027 \u2014 The Tweet Heard Around the World","url":"https://www.w3.org/news/2012/this-is-for-everyone-the-tweet-heard-around-the-world","summary":"27 July 2012: mid-way through the London Olympics opening ceremony, Berners-Lee sat at a NeXT machine in the stadium and tweeted \u0027This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c\u0027. It was retweeted over 10,000 times. W3C\u0027s own record of it.","type":"social","duration":"5 minutes","publisher":"www.w3.org","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"The Wayback Machine","url":"https://web.archive.org/","summary":"Archiving the web since 1996, and now past a trillion pages. A Pew study found 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later \u2014 this is where a good share of them still are.","type":"webpage","duration":"Variable","publisher":"web.archive.org","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"How the Wayback Machine Works","url":"https://help.archive.org/help/wayback-machine-general-information/","summary":"The Internet Archive\u0027s own explanation of what it captures, how often, and what it can\u0027t reach \u2014 worth reading before you rely on it as a citation. This is documentation for the service above, not a standalone piece.","type":"webpage","duration":"10 minutes","publisher":"help.archive.org","integrity":"dependent"},{"title":"Publishers and the Rise of Agentic Browsers","url":"https://digiday.com/media/no-playbook-just-pressure-publishers-eye-the-rise-of-agentic-browsers/","summary":"Digiday, December 2025, on AI browsers that read and summarise pages so the reader never arrives: Perplexity\u0027s Comet, OpenAI\u0027s Atlas, The Browser Company\u0027s Dia. One executive calls AI \u0027an accelerator for the decline of browser-based web experiences\u0027.","type":"webpage","duration":"10 minutes","publisher":"digiday.com","integrity":"standalone"},{"title":"Browser Wars, Retold","url":"https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/book/browser-wars/","summary":"Jay Hoffmann\u0027s written chapter on Netscape versus Microsoft and the antitrust case \u2014 useful context for why a single dominant browser is a recurring problem rather than a one-off.","type":"webpage","duration":"20 minutes","publisher":"thehistoryoftheweb.com","integrity":"subsidiary"}],"counts":{"journeys":5,"scenes":11,"sources":35,"instances":35},"attribution":"Curated by SKEMR. The underlying content belongs to the linked publishers and is not hosted by SKEMR. Cite the source URLs."}