# The Web — From One Proposal to Everything > In March 1989 a CERN physicist submitted a proposal his manager described as 'vague, but exciting'. 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. - **Canonical URL:** https://skemr.com/experience/the-web - **Category:** History - **Curated by:** SKEMR AI - **Contents:** 5 journeys, 11 chapters, 35 sources - **Last updated:** 2026-08-31 ## What this is A curated transmedia experience: existing web sources selected and ordered by an editor. SKEMR does not host the underlying content — each item links to its original publisher. Journeys are alternative routes through the same material. ## Journeys ### The Whole Story, In Order 1945 to now, chronologically — the idea, the proposal, the giveaway, the wars, the crash, the platforms, the phone, and the AI browsers. - Steps: 35 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-timeline - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-timeline/briefing.md ### The Web in 15 Minutes One stop per chapter — the fastest honest version of the whole story. - Steps: 11 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-quick - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-quick/briefing.md ### How the Web Actually Works HTML, HTTP, URLs and the standards process — the machinery under the history, for people who want to know why a page loads at all. - Steps: 19 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-technical - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-technical/briefing.md ### Where It's Going Agentic browsers, the traffic collapse publishers are bracing for, and the inventor's own argument about what to do — with just enough history to see why it rhymes. - Steps: 15 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-future - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-future/briefing.md ### Everything All 35 sources across all eleven chapters — history, technical, standards, archive and future. - Steps: 35 - Machine-readable: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-full - Briefing for a chat: https://skemr.com/api/ai-context/the-web/journeys/j-full/briefing.md ## Chapters - **Before the Web** — The idea of linked documents is older than the computers that made it work. Vannevar Bush described an associative-linking machine in 1945. - **Geneva, 1989 — The Proposal** — Tim Berners-Lee writes 'Information Management: A Proposal'. His manager Mike Sendall annotates it 'Vague, but exciting'. That note is why the web exists. - **The First Website, The First Browser** — info.cern.ch is still there. So is a working rebuild of the original WorldWideWeb browser, running inside a modern one. - **1993 — CERN Gives It Away** — CERN releases the web into the public domain, royalty-free, forever. Had it been licensed instead, almost nothing that follows happens. - **The Browser Wars** — Mosaic, then Netscape, then Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows — and the antitrust case that followed. - **Boom and Bust** — Everything with a domain name was worth money until suddenly it wasn't. The 1995-2000 bubble and what it left behind. - **Web 2.0 — The Read-Write Web** — The web stops being something you read and becomes something you post to. Which is closer to what the 1989 proposal actually described. - **The Mobile Shift** — More people reach the web through a phone than a desktop. Responsive design, coined in 2010, is the technique that made one site work everywhere. - **How It Actually Works** — Three inventions, all from the same person, all still in use: HTML, HTTP and the URL — plus the protocol's thirty-year evolution from one-line requests to HTTP/3. - **Keeping It Open** — Standards bodies, accessibility guidelines and a non-profit archive are the reason the web is still one web rather than several incompatible ones. - **Where It's Going** — AI browsers that read pages so you don't have to, the publishers watching their referral traffic evaporate, and the web's inventor writing about how to fix it. ## Sources - [The Memex — Hypertext, Imagined in 1945](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex): Vannevar Bush's 'As We May Think' described a machine storing all your books and records, linked associatively and consulted 'with exceeding speed and flexibility'. Forty-four years before the proposal that built it. - [History of the World Wide Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web): The whole arc in one article: precursors, CERN 1989-91, the public launch, open standards and globalisation, and the web-as-platform era. - [Tim Berners-Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee): The physicist-contractor who wrote the proposal, the first browser, the first server, HTML, HTTP and the URL — then gave all of it away. - [World Wide Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web): What the thing actually is, as distinct from the internet it runs on — a point almost every news report gets wrong. - [CERN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN): A particle physics laboratory that accidentally produced the most consequential piece of civilian software of the century, as an internal documentation tool. - [Browser Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars): 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. - [Mosaic — The Browser That Made It Popular](): Not the first browser, but the first one ordinary people used. It put images inline with text, which sounds trivial and changed everything. - [Netscape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape): Mosaic's commercial successor, briefly the dominant force on the web, and the losing side of the first browser war. - [Marc Andreessen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen): Co-author of Mosaic as a student, then co-founder of Netscape — the person who turned the web from a research tool into an industry. - [The Dot-Com Bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble): 1995 to 2000: valuations detached from revenue, then didn't. What survived the crash became the infrastructure of the next twenty years. - [Web 2.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0): User-generated content, participation and the platform model — a shift in how the web was used rather than a change to the web itself. - [The Mobile Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_web): The web reached through phones, tablets and watches — now the majority of how people use it at all. - [Responsive Web Design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design): 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. - [HTML](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML): Written by Berners-Lee in late 1990 at CERN. Still the standard markup language for everything a browser displays, thirty-six years later. - [Net Neutrality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality): 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. - [The World Wide Web Consortium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium): 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. - ['This Is for Everyone' — The 2025 Memoir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_for_Everyone): Berners-Lee's 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. - [The Birth of the Web, by CERN](https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web): CERN's own account of what happened in its buildings between 1989 and 1993, written by the organisation that was there. - [info.cern.ch — The First Website](https://info.cern.ch/): The world's 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's desk. - [The WorldWideWeb Browser, Rebuilt and Usable](https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/): For the web's thirtieth anniversary in February 2019, developers at CERN rebuilt the original 1990 browser to run inside a modern one. You can actually use it. - [Web@30 — CERN's Own Timeline](https://web30.web.cern.ch/web-history.html): CERN's anniversary history, from the 1989 proposal through 1994: first website, public domain release, and the browsers and servers that followed. - [A Brief History of the World Wide Web](https://videos.cern.ch/record/2665428): CERN's 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. - [Tim Berners-Lee: The Future of the Web (1994)](https://videos.cern.ch/record/2671957): His talk at the first International World-Wide Web Conference at CERN in May 1994, digitised by CERN's Digital Memory project. He is describing the future while standing in it. - [Berners-Lee at 20 Years of the Web](https://home.cern/resources/video/computing/interview-tim-berners-lee-20th-anniversary-world-wide-web): CERN's anniversary interview with the inventor, looking back on what the web became once other people got hold of it. - [Web History — The Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/web-history/id1535003098): 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. - [Web History on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/0vR1DIKcA0DH8904tAOHSd): The same series, if Spotify is where you listen. Chapter 10 is the browser wars. - [The Evolution of HTTP](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Evolution_of_HTTP): MDN on how the protocol went from HTTP/0.9 — a single line, GET only, no headers — through HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 to HTTP/3 over QUIC. - [W3C — The Standards Body](https://www.w3.org/): The consortium Berners-Lee founded, which still publishes the specifications browsers are meant to agree on. - [WHATWG — HTML as a Living Standard](https://whatwg.org/): Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have maintained HTML since 2004 as a 'living standard' with no version numbers — a direct response to the versioned-spec era stalling. Read the W3C entry first; this only makes sense against it. - [WCAG — Making the Web Usable by Everyone](https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/): The accessibility standard: WCAG 2.0 in 2008, 2.1 in 2018, 2.2 in 2023 — and 2.2 became ISO/IEC 40500 in 2025. The nearest thing the web has to a legal floor. - ['This Is for Everyone' — The Tweet Heard Around the World](https://www.w3.org/news/2012/this-is-for-everyone-the-tweet-heard-around-the-world): 27 July 2012: mid-way through the London Olympics opening ceremony, Berners-Lee sat at a NeXT machine in the stadium and tweeted 'This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c'. It was retweeted over 10,000 times. W3C's own record of it. - [The Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/): 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 — this is where a good share of them still are. - [How the Wayback Machine Works](https://help.archive.org/help/wayback-machine-general-information/): The Internet Archive's own explanation of what it captures, how often, and what it can't reach — worth reading before you rely on it as a citation. This is documentation for the service above, not a standalone piece. - [Publishers and the Rise of Agentic Browsers](https://digiday.com/media/no-playbook-just-pressure-publishers-eye-the-rise-of-agentic-browsers/): Digiday, December 2025, on AI browsers that read and summarise pages so the reader never arrives: Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas, The Browser Company's Dia. One executive calls AI 'an accelerator for the decline of browser-based web experiences'. - [Browser Wars, Retold](https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/book/browser-wars/): Jay Hoffmann's written chapter on Netscape versus Microsoft and the antitrust case — useful context for why a single dominant browser is a recurring problem rather than a one-off. ## Attribution Curated by SKEMR. The underlying content belongs to the linked publishers. Please cite the source URLs rather than SKEMR for factual claims.