The Resilience of the World Wide Web

The very first website, built 30 years ago, still renders perfectly. This isn't an accident—it reveals the web's foundational and surprisingly forgiving design.

#1about 2 minutes

Understanding the inherent resilience of HTML

HTML is fundamentally designed to be error-tolerant and forgiving for non-professionals, unlike JavaScript which fails on simple mistakes.

#2about 2 minutes

The creation of the web by Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN to facilitate information sharing among scientists, with resilience built in from the start.

#3about 3 minutes

How browsers achieve forward and backward compatibility

Browsers ensure compatibility by ignoring unrecognized HTML tags and treating them as generic elements in the DOM, as seen with the noscript tag.

#4about 2 minutes

Recreating deprecated HTML tags with modern techniques

Deprecated tags like blink and marquee can be brought back to life using CSS animations, demonstrating HTML's flexibility.

#5about 7 minutes

How the HTML tokenizer parses tags and attributes

The browser's tokenizer processes HTML character by character, allowing for unconventional but valid tag names which enables frameworks like Angular and Vue.

#6about 1 minute

Why semantic HTML is still critically important

Despite HTML's flexibility with custom tags, using proper semantic elements like the button tag is essential for accessibility and built-in browser functionality.

#7about 5 minutes

How the DOM tree builder automatically corrects errors

The tree builder ensures a valid DOM by automatically inserting missing elements like html and body, and by intelligently fixing improperly nested tags.

#8about 3 minutes

Embracing the web's original spirit of creation

The web was designed for everyone to create and share content, so developers should build personal websites instead of relying solely on commercial platforms.

#9about 2 minutes

How the noscript tag actually works in browsers

The noscript tag's content is treated as plain text by the parser, which explains why it cannot be nested, styled, or contain a functional script tag.