Dreams 243.06260 and 243.06540 (page 58) were created by software artist scott Draves through an evolutionary algorithm running on a worldwide cyborg mind consisting of 60,000 computers and people; scottDraves.com.

implementation within Internet Explorer made it virtually impossible for Web developers to create content that would play consistently across multiple browsers.

Note that this period also saw significant movement away from Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the Web. Web authors had started down the slippery slope of authoring for the dominant browser, thereby losing sight of the Web contract that had

carefully arranged for Web content to be independent of the software that consumed it.

This breach might have seemed insignificant at the time, at least with respect to deploying Web content. The network effect that led to exponential growth in Web content during the 1990s meant that the Web had already taken off and that the slowdown in the network effect resulting from content coming to depend on a particular class

 

54 CommunICatIons of the aCm | feBRuaRY 2009 | vol. 52 | No. 2

of Web browsers did not immediately hamper growth. But the increasing interdependency between creator and consumer was not without cost; despite high hopes, the first round of the mobile Web fizzled in early 2000 partly because it was impossible to support mainstream Web content authored for a desktop browser on small devices like cellphones and PDAs. The problems that resulted from Web authors coding to a particular browser involved

iMage by scott draves