Neil Daly
There are currently just under 2 billion websites on the internet, this figure expands by the minute as new sites are constantly going live. A large portion of these sites are inactive, however many older sites are still viewable and usable on the web, allowing us to gaze and scroll upon bygone eras of web design. The first website went live 30 years ago in 1991. It was developed in the years prior by a CERN team led by Tim Berners Lee.
With 0 active cookies, this is the one of the few websites I’ve visited recently which doesn’t tell me that it cares about my online privacy while asking me to optimise my preferences on data collection.
CERN’s website is a simple page consisting of multiple hyperlinks, explaining the concept of the world wide web (the W3 name never really caught on). The navigation of this website is quite frustrating by modern standards. The hyperlink format, which brings you to a separate page with every click creates a disjointed experience, one page leads to another with a different set of hyperlinks to other pages, there’s no semblance of a “home” on this site. Additionally, it seems that some links are no longer usable, which is a shame. These useless links create unwanted clutter on the site.
This site was built to put into use technologies such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) which had been developed by Berners-Lee and his team. There quite clearly isn’t a design focus involved in this project. As I mentioned the hyperlinking, is functional, but it has its shortcomings.
The times new roman black text on white background is somewhat bland and unappealing. The only colour comes from the blue hyperlinked terms on the site. I did enjoy using the website through the lens of the line-mode browser simulator, further retrograding this old website felt apt.
It’s amazing to see just how far we’ve come in the 30 years of public access to the world wide web. Would’ve Berners-Lee and other CERN scientists considered how integral the internet would become to our daily lives all those years ago? Regardless, their achievement on this project was monumental, I hope the site remains as it, online for all future generations to see the online equivalent of the Leang Tedongnge Cave Paintings in Indonesia.You can experience this online time capsule for yourself by visiting CERN’s Website.
