The full register
Everything, in one table
The whole roster in chain order. This is the dense form; the front page carries the edit.
| Stage | Piece | What it covers | Section | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | The first server | Tim Berners-Lee wrote it on a NeXT cube at CERN, and the protocol it spoke is recognisably the one still in use. | Origins | Long piece |
| 01 | The standards split | The W3C and the WHATWG went different ways on HTML and eventually converged again. | Origins | Full piece |
| 01 | Why nothing is ever removed | The web cannot break old pages, so every mistake is permanent. | Origins | Short piece |
| 02 | DNS from the root | The name is resolved by walking down a hierarchy from the root, with caching at every step. | Resolution | Full piece |
| 02 | TTL and staleness | A cached answer has a lifetime, which is why a change takes time to be seen everywhere. | Resolution | Full piece |
| 02 | Anycast | The same address answered by many machines, and the network decides which. | Resolution | Short piece |
| 03 | The certificate chain | Your browser trusts a small set of roots, and everything else is vouched for down a chain from one of them. | Trust | Full piece |
| 03 | What the padlock does not mean | It says the connection is private, not that the site is honest. | Trust | Full piece |
| 03 | Revocation | Withdrawing trust from a certificate turns out to be much harder than granting it. | Trust | Short piece |
| 04 | The critical path | Stylesheets block rendering because nothing can be laid out until the rules are known, and a font can hold text invisible while it loads. | Rendering | Long piece |
| 04 | Reflow and repaint | Changing geometry costs far more than changing colour, and knowing which is which is most of performance work. | Rendering | Full piece |
| 04 | Parsing before the download ends | The tree is built incrementally, which is why a badly placed script stalls everything. | Rendering | Short piece |
| 05 | Specificity | A scoring system decides which rule wins, and it is not the one that appears last. | The Cascade | Full piece |
| 05 | Inheritance | Some properties pass down the tree and some do not, and the list is arbitrary history. | The Cascade | Short piece |
| 05 | Who designed it | Håkon Wium Lie proposed style sheets and Bert Bos shaped what became CSS. | The Cascade | Full piece |
| 06 | The same spec, two results | Specifications leave gaps, and each engine fills them differently. | Where Browsers Differ | Full piece |
| 06 | Prefixes and their legacy | Vendor prefixes were meant to be temporary and became permanent. | Where Browsers Differ | Short piece |
| 06 | Testing what you cannot see | Conformance suites exist because agreement has to be demonstrated, not assumed. | Where Browsers Differ | Full piece |