Re: Planning to close Web History Community Group due to inactivity unless we hear from you

+MaxF, Wendy

On Mon, 6 Mar 2023 at 18:33, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Agreee Dan - how to tell the W3C algorithm
>

Ian's already noticed. Thanks, Ian!

I think it's a pity to fully close CGs just to make it easier to find the
most active ones. Seems more like a UI issue than a process thing.  But
either way this is a helpful nudge.

Time flies. We should make an effort to be more active! I don't think I
even sent an intro here...

I got into the webhistory topic around 2009 or so when I worked at Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam and was slightly mortified to realize I was lined up
to teach students who were mostly younger than the web. And even that
moment is 13 years ago now too.

At the time I was delighted to realize that you could run an old version of
TimBL's WorldWideWeb NextStep/OpenStep browser on VMWare if you could get
your hands on (virtual and real) disks for OpenStep, etc. You can even try
to build the codebase, although we never got that working, some libwww
issues (ObjectiveC version I think). But you could at least click on .nib
files to bring up the NeXT Interface Builder, and even drag bits of the
browser UI around and pretend you're helping TimBL invent the Web. I talked
to some Apple / NeXT obsessives about whether the .nib interface
definitions could be brought up to date, version by version, so they'd run
in modern iOS/OSX dev tools. A little known fact being that most iphone
apps are created in the successor to the tool TimBL used back in the day.
It might be good if Apple could give away licenses to the old OpenStep
versions so that schools, museums, etc could run copies of it in virtual
machines, without worrying about ending up in court. They'd probably need
to worry about security, and HTTP 1.1 Host: headers, TLS etc instead. But
even without accessing modern web content it is fascinating to play with
the original browser. I found it extremely wiki-like. Messy screencast test
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb_hu3k0KWw (made in 2012, never
circulated here!). Oh, just found this too, a talk I gave at Cern for the
20 years of the Web, it talks about FOAF and the earlier ideas for
semantics in the Web. And TimBL's unsung artwork,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgtbbJctXNk

What else? Wendy and friends arranged a History of the Web event at the Web
conference last year - https://www2022.thewebconf.org/cfp/special/history/
- it would be good to know what future plans there are. Wendy? :)

TimBL and I have talked about webhistory on and off over the years. There
were some files from Cern that needed sorting (personal vs historical, I
guess). I remember recommending something around the FUSE virtual
filesystem for the old disk format, afaik it worked, ... but I forget what
happened next. Tim? :)

What should we be doing to be more organized? Every passing year, more old
sites dissapear, ... more people leave our communities forever.

Talking of, hope you are all well!

Dan