I agreed to do two lectures on hypertext history, as I thought I know a bit about that. I did the first lecture (Bush to Berners-Lee) using a few textbooks (especially The New Media Reader), the ACM library and Wikipedia. That was OK. Today, I did from 1990 to today. Voyager and the CD-ROMs was OK. But Web history?
I had no idea. I've scrapped at least four lecture plans. I know a lot of details on web history, but don't know how to make a sensible overview.
Ida Engholm in Copenhagen has done a very interesting PhD on the style history of web design, but her trend timeline is much too detailed for this level. She also points to the fact that we don't have good archives. Waybackmachine has little before 1996. I had to rely on screenshots scanned from books!
The lecture may have been OK, but definitely not better than that.
Students love periods, so I tried this:
I wanted to get a grip on the forces that drive the history, so I tried to speak about structure versus presentation, and examples of technology as enabling and limiting. I spoke of how web design became a profession and the invention of information architecture. I showed some trends: the metaphors of the nineties, CNets left navigation column, Discovery's horizontal layout and HotWired's Splash screens.
I meant to talk about CSS and XML, blogs and folksonomies, but ran out of time.
Anyone seen a good history of web design?
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