[Air-L] History of 'Home' in internet browsers

Sun May 6 19:35:57 PDT 2012

(Thomas Haigh here...)

This one I know the answer to. As I wrote in a footnote to "The Web's
Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals" in *The Internet and American
Business*, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press,
2008:159-200:

The idea of a home page went back to Tim Berners-Lee and the origin of the
Web. Berners-Lee had imagined that browsers would include integrated
editing capabilities, so that each user would have a personal home page
that he or she could edit to include links to pages of interest as well as
public messages for other visitors. (Something rather like a blog). This
explains the dual meaning of the term home page as both “the default start
page for someone’s browser” and “the main page holding information about a
person or company.” James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web Was
Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 193-4.

Remember that TBL's original browser could edit web pages as well as
display them. (This was easy to implement on his NeXT computer because of
its library of powerful, reusable object tools). In his original scheme the
home page would fulfill the same function that bookmarks were used for in
later browsers, but would be shared with everyone on the web. Thinking
about how the web would have developed if this integrated editing
capability had been retained is an interesting exercise.

In fact the edit capability vanished from Mosaic, the first widely used
browser. Browsing and editing were done with different tools, and bookmarks
were private. Browser makers configured home page defaults to point to
their own websites.

Many early personal home pages really did include a mixture of links to
recommended sites and information about their owners. You could argue that
making this list of favorite pages public prefigured more recent social
media innovations such as the "like" button.

TBL discusses his original browser at
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html, including a
screenshot<http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif>.
He writes

The "Link" menu you can see. "Mark all" would remember the URI of where you
were. "MArk selection" would make an anchor (link target) for the selected
text, give it an ID, and remember the URI of that fragment. "Link to
Marked" would make a link from the current selection to whatever URI you
had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to somewhere
interesting, hitting Command/M, going to the document you were writing and
selecting some text, and hitting Command/L. "Link to new" would create a
new window, prompt for a URI (ugh - it should have made one up!) and make a
link from the selection to the new document. You never saw the URIs - you
could of course always find documents by following the link to them.

However the ability to save the edited page directly to the web server was
not implemented.

It would browse http:space and news: and ftp: spaces and localfile: space,
but edit only in file: space as HTTP PUT was not implemented back then.

More on the history of web browsers in Thomas Haigh, "Protocols for Profit:
Web and E-mail Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" in *The Internet
and American Business*, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT
Press, 2008: 105-158 (preprint
online)<../Writing/ProtocolsForProfitDRAFT.pdf>and on the history of
web navigation in "The
Web's Missing Links: Search Engines and Portals" [in the same
volume]:159-200 (preprint online) <../Writing/WebsMissingLinksDRAFT.pdf>.

Best wishes,

Tom Haigh
www.tomandmaria.com/tom

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Marianne van den Boomen <
M.V.T.vandenBoomen at uu.nl> wrote:
> Hi Sue,
>
> Intriquing question! I remember working with Mosaic and Cello back in
1994,
> and they both already had a home button (an online check for screenshots
> affirms this). As far as I can see Tim Berners-Lees first browser in 1991
> did not have a home button (see http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html)
> neither did the 1993 version (see here
> http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser1.html) Yet, the screenshot does show a
page
> called My homepage (in the title bar called: Tim's home page).
> May be the home of the home button is just Tim's home page? ;-)
>
> kind regards
>
> Marianne van den Boomen
>
>
> On 6-5-12 11:46, Sue Thomas wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>>
>>
>> I wonder if anyone can help?  I'm trying to track down when and why it
>> was decided to use the term 'Home' and its accompanying icon in web
>> browser design. Does anyone have any information on that?
>>
>>
>>
>> We have got so used to it that it's almost invisible in our
>> consciousness, but Home is not default in every part of the world. In
>> the Middle East for example, that function is called the Main Page, not
>> the Home Page. I'm thinking that 'home' is probably an American concept
>> in this context.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'd also like to collect more equivalencies from non-English speaking
>> countries, so please do get in touch if your country's browser features
>> something other than 'home'.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'd be most grateful for your thoughts on the above. Please reply
>> backchannel to sue.thomas at dmu.ac.uk
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Many thanks
>>
>>
>>
>> Sue
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _________
>>
>> Sue Thomas
>> Research Professor of New Media
>>
>> IOCT/Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities
>> Clephan 1.01d, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH,
>> UK  +44 (0)116 207 8266
>>
>> w: http://www.technobiophilia.com<http://www.technobiophilia.com/>
>> Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace
>> e: sue.thomas at dmu.ac.uk<mailto:sue.thomas at dmu.ac.uk>
>>
>> t: @suethomas<http://www.twitter.com/suethomas>
>>
>> g: +suethomas<https://plus.google.com/110733806086330324299/>
>>
>>
>>
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>
> --
>
>
> met vriendelijke groeten,
>
> Marianne van den Boomen
>
>
>
>
> Media and Culture Studies | University Utrecht
> Office: Kromme Nieuwegracht 20 (room T2.13A)
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> www.newmediastudies.nl | www.vandenboomen.org
>
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-- 
Maria Haigh, Ph.D.
mhaigh at uwm.edu
Associate Professor
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
School of Information Studies
Northwest Quadrant
Building B, Room 2585
P.O. Box 413
2205 E. Newport
Milwaukee, WI 53211
Tel. 414-229-5397
http://www.tomandmaria.com/maria/