Header has nothing to do with html5.
My message was not entirely serious, but I really find it interesting
that the ancient page, or a replica of an ancient page, uses <HEÂADER>,
which *is* an HTML5 thing too. It is true that here <HEADER> is really
as Chris F.A. Johnson alluded to said:
March 1989 is when Sir Tim first proposed the idea of something that
became http and html.
Well, maybe. The early history of the web is poorly documented, and what
“Sir Tim†(who wasn’t Sir at that time) wrote that time can be construed
as the birth of the web in retrospect only.
The first website went online in 1991, and the
oldest version of that page is from 1992.
Around that time, the World Wide Web was demonstrated to me, and I was
underwhelmed. It was clearly inferior to the well-structured Gopher
system that serious people were working on. It had a line mode
interface, and it lacked structure and flexibility. The World Wide Web
that conquered the world later was really something rather different.
The 1993 'birthday' is the
real birthday of the web because it is when http and html were made
available for anyone to use for anything they wanted, free from patents
or royalties.
As I wrote, it’s good to have several birthdays. But the announcement in
1993 was rather irrelevant both from the perspective of that time and
from our view. The real change was the advent of Mosaic, the first
widely available graphic browser. The patent issue was just theory (even
in our time, computer programs as such are not patentable in the
European Union, and protocols and markup languages aren’t patentable
either, so this was all for US lawyers only).
Within 2 years the web exploded, and within another 2
years, most people were at least aware that it existed, even if it was a
"geek thing".
Well, even Mosaic wasn’t for the general audience really. The most
important explosion was related to the development of Internet
connections, more than anything else. I remember how I commented in 1995
that maybe some day people will be able to use the World Wide Web even
at home! Right, it was possible at that time too, in principle... but
with 1,200 bits per second it wasn’t too sexy. So we could find many
other birthdays, too, more relevant than those that have been
celebrated. Isn’t it nice when you can celebrate your 20th birthday over
and over again?