belated

Real life (day job, injury, sickness, earthquakes, hurricanes) has intruded pretty seriously on this nascent little project for the last three weeks, but I haven’t been resting on my laurels. I’ve been reading James Gleick’s The Information, which is giving me the richest historical background imaginable for the field I’m working to enter. I highly recommend it to any and everyone interested in science, information theory, or the way the world we live in works.

Back in the game this week.

Notes 8/9 (Creation of the Web, Browser Wars, Web Standards)

Creation of the WWW

•  Early 90s  U of Minn creates “Gopher,” popular info retrieval sys used by unis to provide links to files & menus
• 2/1993  U of Minn announces they’ll start charging licensing frees to use Gopher
  +Orgs start looking for free alternatives
• In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee  at CERN had created an info management sys that used “hyperlinks” to link documents to one another & a program to read the hyperlinks
  +Called the program “WorldWideWeb”
• 4/1993 CERN releases the source code for WWW
• 1993 National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases Mosaic, a program that combines WWW browser with a gopher client, massively increasing popularity of WWW
• Browsers begin to proliferate as does use of the web
  +Marc Andreessen leaves NCSA, founds Mosaic Communications, releases Netscape Navigator in 12/94
  +NSCA licenses Mosaic to Microsoft, who builds on it & releases Internet Explorer in 8/95
  +IE fights Netscape on features & competing for developers, period = Browser Wars
  + Opera, built in late 94, maintains a low profile & works for web standards

Rise of Web Standards

• During Browser Wars IE & Netscape competed by adding incompatible features
  +Developers had to build sites that dealt with features/bugs in both browsers
•  1994 Berners-Lee founds the WWW Consortium (W3C) at MIT w/suppport from CERN & DARPA
  +W3C made recommendations for standardization so that content could be available to wides possible population
  +Did not enforce recommendations, were not widely publicized, browser wars continued
•  1998 IE5 beta is released, bringing the total # of JavaScript styles to five.
• Web professionals revolt & form Web Standards Project (WaSP), rebranding the W3C “recommendations” as “standards.”
• 2000 IE5 for Mac is released mostly adhering to W3C recs
• WaSP persuades Netscape to delay the release of Navigator 5 til it is more W3C compliant
  +This work becomes the foundation of Firefox
• 2002 Wired Magazine redesigns site using web standards
• 2003 ESPN redesigns using web standards
• Web standards are now understood as de rigeur

Study Questions:

1. What browsers are available on the Internet today for users of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux?
   The short answer: a lot. We’ve come a long way from a battle of two titans. The top 5 are Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and Opera.
2. What percentage of web users use each browser?
   The most recent stats at W3schools say Firefox has a 42% share, followed by Chrome at 28, IE at 23, Safari at 4%, and Opera at 2%. Nerds.
3. What browsers do mobile devices use when accessing web pages?
   Biggest slice of the pie goes to Safari. Gotta love the iPhone.
4. How many web standards have the W3C published, and which are widely supported by browser manufacturers today?
   There are 30 standards, the majority of which are widely supported.

Reading Notes 8/7 (Internet’s Origins)

The Internet’s Origins

• Russians launch Sputnik, US forms DARPA in response to R&D future tech
• 1960 Joseph Licklider publishes “Man-Computer Symbiosis”
  +imagines networked computers for info storage/retrieval
• 1962 Licklider is head of DARPA’s info processing, forms research team
• 1967 post-Licklider team conceives first design for network
  +network is called “ARPANET”
• 1969 ARPANET design is implemented in a 4-computer network
  +”packet-switching” technique breaks data requests into small chunks
  +less resource-intensive to process, faster
•  ”Packet-switching” adopted as data trading method in other networks
  +U.K. University network “JANET” (used to send files & e-mail)
  + Compuserve
  -+these networks were smaller and more private than the net we know today
  -+lack of standardization w/r/t networking protocols became an issue
• 1974  Robert Kahn & Vinton Cerf create TCP/IP protocol to reduce stand. issues
  +reduced the role of the machines in the network
  +left transmission integrity to the host machine
  +became possible to join all nets together
• 1977 3 networks communicate
• 1982 ARPANET connections outside the US converted to TCP/IP
  +”the internet as we know it had arrived”

getting started

tldr: I’m gonna become a web designer. Then a web developer. Then a UX designer. It’s gonna take some work.

Goals: I’m teaching myself User Experience design from the very beginning, starting with refreshers in the history of the internet, HTML5, CSS and Javascript. From there I’ll learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. At that point I’ll move into learning the broader user science strategies of Info Architecture and UX. My reasons for wanting to go into this career field are tied into who I am, and I may or may not expand on them in this space in the future, but my immediate goal is to build a design portfolio that I can use to gain entrance into a design graduate program. I’ve chosen a sandbox WordPress template so that, in addition to functioning as my journal of progress as I learn, I can also use it to experiment as I work through new competencies.

Status: I’ve just now begun the learning process. Despite my database day job and a touch of HTML & CSS skills acquired over the course of a digital native life, I’m nowhere near a web professional. I’m ready to change that. I’ll be using WaSP Interact’s web student curriculum in tandem with Opera’s web standards library, along with books, blogs, and meetups with local UX professionals. This fall I’ll be interning at Contact, an unconference for web professionals & forward-thinkers designing the path forward for the user-centered social net. I’ll also be taking, just for fun, Stanford’s upcoming fall course on Artificial Intelligence.

Assignments this week include–

Video
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Readings
“History of the Internet and the Web”
“How Does the Internet Work”
“Better Writing Through Design”
“The Discipline of Content Design”
“The Web Standards Model”
“Concepts in Info Architecture”
“What Does A Good Web Page Need?”
“Color Theory“
“Web Standards: Beautiful Dream”