Today we announced that we have joined the Libra Association, the governance for a global stable coin. Nick has written a post on the USV blog explaining our decision. I have argued before that we don’t really know what path will take us to a decentralized future and therefore have to try many things. Some of these paths involve centralized corporations exposing their endusers to crypto. Nobody has more users than Facebook! There is a historic analogy here to when Microsoft released Internet ...

Today is the wrap up of the initial web cycle. Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced Javascript as determining the behavior of a web page and interacting with HTML (the content of the page) and CSS (the look and feel). Now it makes sense to revisit the Web Browser, which needs to put all those pieces together to actually display the web page and let the user interact with it. By now it should come as no surprise that this is in fact quite a difficult job and that the web browser is a rather elabora...

The topic of last week’s Tech Tuesday was CSS, which determines the look and feel of the content of a web page (where the content itself is described in HTML). Today we will learn about Javascript, which is a programming language that lets us control the behavior of the web page (both by itself and in reaction to what the user does). Together HTML, CSS and Javascript determine what a web browser does in Steps 7 and 8 of the web cycle. What is a programming language? It is a language that lets...

In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to the enduser. For our purposes today we will look at a three item list. You may recall that the list is defined by the and ta...

Over the next three Tech Tuesdays we will cover the three essential technologies that together make up the bulk of most web sites: HTML, CSS and Javascript. This is Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser uses these three (which were all retrieved from one or more web servers) to construct a web page. The easiest way to think of how these three make up a page is as follows: HTML is the content of the page, CSS is the look-and-feel of the page and Javascript is the behavior of the page (...

Evan Williams apparently recently said that there is an issue with all of us being stuck in a kind of “continuous present” on the web (ironically, I can’t find that quote right now). I am certainly stuck in that all powerful present many days. There is so much new output hitting the web every day that one can barely scratch the surface of it, let alone delve into the past. Google has only aggravated this problem by tilting their search algorithm more heavily towards recency. Techmeme – one of...

We have now reached step 6 of the web cycle and are back at the web browser. The web browser is receiving an initial HTTP response from the web server. The first part of this response tells the web browser is whether or not the web server is delivering some useful information. That happens via the response status, which will be 200 OK if the HTTP request is being properly fulfilled. The second part are additional so-called response headers which provide information about the content that is c...

If you have been following along, we are now on Step 5 of the web cycle where we find ourselves at the server that is answering an HTTP request. Because the HTTP protocol is well defined anyone in theory can implement a web server. In practice these days most people run one of less than a handful of servers with Apache, IIS (Microsoft) and more recently nginx accounting for the bulk of all web sites. The reason for this degree of concentration is that much like database software, the web serv...

We are continuing along with the web request cycle. Last week we took a look at the HTTP protocol. There I already mentioned that HTTP requests and responses travel over a TCP/IP connection. Today we will dive a bit deeper into TCP/IP. This is technically not really necessary for understanding the request cycle because these lower levels of the network are completely abstracted away when you develop for the web (which is a fancy way of saying you get to use it without worrying about how it wo...

Today we are continuing on with the web request cycle. After the browser has parsed the URL and obtained the IP address of the server via DNS, the browser now has to communicate with the server. That is done using the so-called Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP for short. The beginnings of HTTP go back to the early 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee first devised it drawing inspiration from Ted Nelson, who had coined the term Hypertext in 1963. For an even earlier description of a similar idea it i...