Arc and Angle To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge. – Grace Hopper

The Original Web Browser Created By Tim Berners-Lee

I'm currently reading a book Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. The book explains how the web came to be, and I've been periodically looking up people, languages and other elements that the book mentions.

Berners-Lee had quite a journey trying to get other people to understand, let alone get excited about, the possibilities of the World Wide Web as a means of freely sharing and distributing information.

One of the key features he knew he needed was a user-friendly interface. In other words, he needed a web browser.

It just so happened that a company in France had a great text editor, but they didn't want to work with him on developing it for his project unless the European Union would pay for the development time. There were lots of similar road blocks, and ultimately, he realized he had to develop his own browser so that he could use it to demonstrate the World Wide Web in a clear, easy-to-understand manner to his physicist co-workers at CERN.

He was envisioning that a browser would allow users to be able to edit documents, so his browser is like a combination of a text editor and a modern browser.

Screenshot of First World Wide Web Browser

Here's a screenshot of the original World Wide Web browser on a NeXT computer:

Librarians Really Are Gatekeepers To Information

Also, I'd like to point out that one of the key moments in getting his project to be accepted was when a kick ass librarian at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in Palo Alto (SLAC) named Louise Addis persuaded her colleague who developed tools for her, to write the program that would allow their server to be the first Web server outside of CERN. She realized that it would be an amazing way to make their huge database of documents available to physicists around the world and it was exactly what Berners-Lee needed to prove to his physicist co-workers that this Web thing would be useful to them.

Grid Based Design

At work, I'm starting on a massive website redesign project that is already well on its way. While I have a lot of experience working with HTML and CSS to develop the structure and visual styles of a website, this project is using software and techniques that are pretty much entirely new to me.

One of these techniques is a way of approaching layout design using a grid based design structure. The idea behind it is that it provides a very well-balanced visual structure and its supposed to give developers a more thought-out and consistent layout. It's supposed to be better for quick prototyping, but for me at least, it is far from intuitive. Right now, it slows me down because I haven't gotten used to it. I'm excited to be working on this though because I do believe it'll be a very useful skill to develop and one that I would probably never have bothered to take the time to learn on my own account. With so much to learn in this field, I rarely go back to the things I think I already know and try to find a new way of doing them.

I've only taken a cursory look at our current design, but I've been reading a bit about grid designs this weekend and I'm excited to get back to work to find out a thing or two about the current design I'll be working on.  I think I'd like to pick the brain of our designer a bit and see if he'll walk me through his design process and choices. There are tons of online articles and resources on grid based design and I'm too new to it to write about it intelligently, but if anyone is interested in getting started, Smashing Magazine put together a great overview and I've particularly been impressed with Mark Boulton's "Five Simple steps to Designing Grid Systems".

The Golden Section is a ratio which is evident throughout the universe as the number Phi. You can use this ratio to good effect in design by making sure that elements of your grid conform to this ratio. Using the Golden Section can ensure a natural sense of correct composition, even though it is based in mathematics it will ‘feel’ right.