Why Webmaster's Still Matter

We learned HTML by looking at other people's source code. We experimented. We broke things. We fixed them. We used snippets from wherever we could. We spent a lot of time trying to make a table sit exactly where we wanted it.

Tutorials weren’t so widely available; so we mostly learned by tinkering, by accident and soometimes learning was simply the fall out of trying to make something work.

There wasn't one place where you could type "How do I center a table?" and get answers in seconds.

And that was part of the charm.

You weren't just a consumer of the internet.

You were helping coax it into existence and it was actually worth having. You were part of the romance of building it.

Participation culture was huge and it applied towards the world wide web not just the platorm.

The people who became webmasters came from all walks of life. Some were artists, writers, academics, hobbyists, or simply curious people eager to explore what the open frontier of the home computer could be used to create.

But we had one thing in common:

We knew how to make a website.

And that little skill carried you, so you could establish a hobby or career back then.

You could have an idea, open a text editor, write some HTML, use a file transfer protocol (FTP) to upload it to a server and you were initiated into the digital sphere.

Maybe your site was about teenage idols.

Maybe your site was about beanie babies.

Maybe it was about your favorite books, your artwork, your obsession with Star Trek, your travel journal or some obscure subject that only three other people on earth cared about.

This wasn’t important.

You made a page.

You put it online.

And sometimes, somehow, you waited for people to gravitate.

Our websites weren't always beautiful or finely manicured.

Hell, some of them were downright hideous because let’s face it! The web was young, so there were:

But underneath all that chaos was something beautiful.

The web felt personal.

We've built extraordinary things on the modern web but we've also built layers of complexity between people and the things we’re striving to create.

Dashboards and metrics, for example, that need an interpreter to decipher. Systems designed to make everything easier, while sometimes making the simple act of putting something online feel oddly removed from the experience of creating.

// Here are a set of values that this manifesto argues:

You don't need permission to put something beautiful, strange, useful or completely unnecessary onto the web.

Your ideas don't need to be optimized for engagement; nor do your creations need to perform to be meaningful.

You offer a servicee that supports shared knowledge, open collaboration and free expression.

That's why I still enjoy being a webmaster.

Not because my name goes into the footer on every page.

Not because I'm trying to recreate the 1990s exactly as I remember it.

But because I still believe in what the experience makes possible, which is the ability to:

Webmasters are still needed today to continue the history.

People who are curious about how websites work beneath the surface not just what they can do.

Peole who'd rather build something than read about how it’s built.

People who believe the net should be more than an endless stream of things being quantified, sold, ranked and measured.

Sometimes a webpage can just be a webpage.

A place that shows you what you look like in digital format.

So write the HTML.

Make something the world doesn't require but because you have something to contribute to the internet.