Making An Updated TheProject.html
Morgan Murrah
Visit this hyperlink: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
It is, to my knowledge, a strongly faithful source code reproduction of the original world wide website.
And it works
In 2025, on a modern browser, it just works. When inspected with the verbose mode enabled on the W3C Validator, in 2025, it comes up with several errors, warnings and information items. But it works. It works either served on CERN’s website, or as a local HTML file opened in a browser, or served locally with a server. It. Works.
This is the magic of real adoption, maintenance and care. The now slighty potentially broken thing, the old thing, the early thing has survived and remains alive and useful.
I tested it with a screen reader quickly. And it worked for me. I sent the link to a friend who uses a screen reader and they wrote… “that is so cool” and were able to interact with the web page to their liking.
I mean surely… a few things must not have stood up so strongly all this time? There has to be something that could change… but what an adventure and full of decisions such a task is!
Lets dive in. And let create our own TheProject.html that is updated just a little to the times but keeps the same charm. It is a way of honoring our ancestor websites.
The Idea
Preserve as much of the original content as possible while making it a little more fresh with the times. Reflecting on the enormous timeline of progress since its creation, while also preserving a great deal of its original function.
Getting started
I Made a copy…
I started with the file name and renamed it to index.html . Camel case is not the desired thing here… lets serve it from the root with a more standardized name. Docs generally advise this.
I added a few “bare essentials” to conform to modernity. Doctype, lang attribute, head tag that is introduced by modern browsers into the code anyways, Meta charset declaration inside the head.
I dusted off some junk by removing name attributes on anchor tags that do not seem needed and arise in the HTML checker. I had to move around ever so slightly the header of the page. I gave the main body content a main element.
There you have it! My “Modern refreshed WWW Project”: https://an-updated-world-wide-web.pages.dev/. It is almost exactly the same in function, look and feel.
All credit for reproduction and inspiration to its creators!
How does it do?
Axe Automatic Test: 0 automatic tested accessibility issues.
Arc Toolkit raises 2 alerts that seem not relevant (skip link missing and no nav landmark- currently no nav to skip). Willing to pass on these.
Lighthouse: 3 x 100s (once launched into HTTPS) and an 82 for SEO. I decided not to add a meta description, nor a robots.txt for this initial portable project.
Yellow Lab Tools Takes Kindly to it and it gets 100/100 on mobile and desktop.
… Looking pretty good.
How does it function?
The absolute links needed no changing. They were implemented as absolute links back to the wider project historical creation, documented by CERN. For our purposes, we are just updating this one page, and not all the pages, so it works. You can access the updated world wide web page to link directly back into the originals still.
Running it through the W3C Link Checker produced a single 404 result for the old link to the mailing list. That might be one that is stored in a different archive or not public at the same address. I kept that link for historical reason, in its original href.
What didn’t really change?
Really… quite a lot stayed the same. The line number of the html file changed by less than 5. The description list element is durable into the current day. There is a single h1 and a paragraph and some anchor tags… this is HTML. This remains HTML.
And it works.