Everything Old is New Again

I’ve often wished I was about 5-10 years older. I could have seen a lot more of the music that came out of Seattle in the 90′s (whatever you want to call it) — but I also could have been employed in the tech sector in the 90′s. I wrote HTML before there were any serious HTML editors, let alone Dreamweaver, but that was in high school for me, and by the time I graduated college (2001) the bubble had burst.

Fortunately, everything seems to be coming around again. Now, usually when people say that sort of thing about tech in the 90′s they’re thinking of the “mistakes” particularly in the market, but I’m talking about the actual good ideas. In looking up references for my thesis I came upon the papers from the “Third International World-Wide Web Conference” from 1995 at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, Germany all abstracts here. Even the style of the page – plane vanilla html with blue links – is new again.

To quote a few ideas and titles from the abstracts (my comments outside the quotes)

* “Cooperative Work On the Network: Edit the WWW! – There is a real need for a tool to enable effective collaborative authoring of documents on the WWW” – Hello wiki
* “NCSA is adding support for group and public annotations to its HTTP server and Mosaic client.” – Remember that? I’d say social bookmarking added the needed component individual value.
* “to enable individuals without specialized knowledge of library cataloging or markup to create records for describing and accessing networked electronic resources of various types”
* “Why should web technologists care about intellectual property?” – That seems painfully obvious today, but interesting that it was apparent right from the start.
* “Although HTML identifies structures within a document, it does not allow the semantic content of document sections to be specified explicitly.”
* “Using the Web as a Survey Tool” – Standard practice now