Origins of the Home Page

fireside web stories

Believe it or not, the World Wide Web has been a part of our lives long enough that we are beginning to forget its origins. As children will sit around the camp fire and ask the old timers, “what was life like when there was only black and white TV?”, it is important for us to preserve our anecdotal www heritage NOW.

The question related to me recently was, “what’s the difference between a ‘home page’ and a ‘web page’?”

At first glance, the question seemed ludicrous. We laughed that every page was a web page, so who cared?

It gradually dawned on me that, at one time, before database and server-generated ‘.asp’ pages, the question had made a lot more sense.

I once read an explanation when I was first learning HTML (in 1995 ) that the custom, at one time, was to put up a page where everyone had their own favorite URL’s, as well as a list of the contents of our own sites. It was the first page that greeted you when you went to your site, and the first page you’d navigate back to when you wanted to find a reference to a favorite URL.

Now, there’s a novel concept!

So this was called the “home” page, and it was always named “index”, and all of this was quite unrelated to where we happened to be living at the time, or to our status of incorporation.

Remember, this was way back in the last century! It was before search engines, before people Yahooed, and before “Cool Sites” sites started becoming popular. It was before browsers even started supporting Bookmarks.

The home page WAS the bookmark collection, and it’s all we had. People started earning modest shareware revenues with little utilities to automatically capture and organize URL’s in a little file called a “bookmark”. It was a success, so Netscape expropriated the idea for its commercial browsers.

The WWW was a tiny place then. When my friend Richard egged me on to put up my first page, many sites were still using this format. Folks were still inventing the rules and etiquette of page design on the fly, and we avoided a lot of techniques that wasted bandwidth or otherwise deviated from the “true” purpose of the Home Page.

By the time I came on board the unstoppable HTML train, text that FLASHED at you was available. This was considered the garish height of bad manners and poor taste. Now we have high-bandwidth, full-color animated Java graphics banners – complete with streaming audio and cookies – to annoy and interrogate you wherever you go.

Of course, unless you are one of the fortunate few who can transcend all this with DSL, cable or high speed lines, the web is slower than ever. And we wonder why we can’t handle exponentially increasing customer bases and content downloads.

I came on the scene near the middle of all this. The “founding fathers” of the www had pretty well set the underlying standards and protocols for what was to come, so that users like myself could communicate with each other in a universal format.

It looks to me, from here, like the Home Page is a big part of how the www all started. The World Wide Web grew up, and it became heavily commercialized and even politicized. But you still see some of the origins of the “Home Page” concept at most sites, to this day.

Can you believe, an index page which actually sports a bullet list text index? How old-fashioned. How rustic. How wonderful!

© Alex Forbes March 3, 2000