WorldWideWeb

It's a javascript-based imitation, much like all of those js-based imitations of various Windows versions. The original source code isn't really involved, which is a shame, since it is actually available. IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (mirror: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool. This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373

The repo is incomplete, a lot of files are missing. https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb seems to be a more complete snapshot.

Ever heard of the World Wide Web? https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb

(Edit: lol, we're investigating in parallel.) The oldest code I can find is here: https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeX... WWWNextStep_0.15.tar.gz is dated 1993. It's imported here: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/ Oh, but what is this: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep... 26 March 91 version 0.8 Changed anchor highlighting from dark grey to underline, now underline is available. (I may make underline &/or colour a user preference or style later.) So we know that in March of 1991, links were underlined with a thought toward color in the future. And here's the implementation: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/62b3c9b5082e455... Which looks to me like it uses the default text color with the option to be changed via style: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/62b3c9

Nope, can't find any color screenshots earlier than 1993. But WorldWideWeb.app would have run just fine on the NextStation Color, and NeXT machines elegantly provided a path to color from the very beginning, even when in monochrome. I don't know if pre-1993 links were gray or blue, but one would have thought the author would have bothered to investigate what color the links were. My money is on blue. I'll bet Tim could say for sure. EDIT: as of 1991 (the earliest known code), it was still a black underline in the code. See line 640 of https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep... As of March 1991 he was contemplating providing color underlines, see line 61 here: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep... Clearly it changed between 1991 and 1993 but I don't know when. Money still on WorldWideWeb

This is linked in the article: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/tree/master/NextStep...

The source code for WorldWideWeb is available: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb. I've got it in the back of my mind to try to get it building at some point (either in Previous, or on real hardware; I have a few working NeXT machines). As an ObjC programmer who started 15 years after it was written, it's interesting to see how different it is from even NeXTStep 4.2 (aka OpenStep) era code. Most methods don't have explicit return types (still valid, but ~never used), lots more C, no Foundation (didn't exist yet), AppKit was still using NX, etc. That said, you can tell it's fundamentally the same toolset. There are still classes that more or less exist and work the same way today on modern Mac OS versions, it uses a NIB file, etc.

There's some info about the code at https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/code/ and a github mirror that appears to contain a usable app bundle: https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb