WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone

A week ago, when I was working on my project for HTML Day 2026 I stumbled upon this passage from an essay on blink and marquee tags: At the time, there was a new breed of web professionals proudly labeled “webmasters.” Part designer, part developer and part evangelist, webmasters held enough esoteric knowledge about the web to manage, edit and create websites, both large and small. — Jay Hoffman (August 28th, 2017) And that's when everything clicked for me. Over the past year, I've written dozens of articles on the Independent Web. Forty-two essays on principles, technical tutorials, accessibility, and advocacy. And, in a way, it has all been leading to this manifesto. Only through months of research and getting to know many kind and talented people and building things myself have I finally understood the true power of the webmaster. I think this will be the most important thing I'll ever write, and I wish to share it with you. With everyone. Part One: THE PAST The earliest webmasters were unauthorized, self-taught, one-person operations. The first webmaster was a woman, Stanford librarian Louise Addis. i. ORIGINS (1993) It was a few years after Tim Berners-Lee christened the first web server at CERN at the end of 1990, and published the first website info.cern.ch on August 6th, 1991[1]. The webmaster was first understood as the Internet's equivalent to the real-world postmaster. "Other protocols have defacto standards for well known mailbox names, such as USENET@domain for NNTP (see [RFC977]), and WEBMASTER@domain for HTTP (see [HTTP])." — RFC 2142, "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions," Dave Crocker, Internet Mail Consortium.

"The word “webmaster” comes from a similar role defined in the original specification for email called the postmaster, which in turn comes from the similarly named government position Postmaster General. You can think of the postmaster as an email administrator. The idea being that you can email postmater[sic] @ some domain, and always be connected directly to somebody that could fix a problem with the email. That remains a reserved name today on any email inbox. The webmaster served a pretty similar purpose on the web." — Jay Hoffman, "What Happened to the Webmaster" (June 16, 2020) And thus, webmaster@domain was already the de facto email inbox address tied to the HTTP protocol itself. The label and title quickly grew into something far more than that, though. "At first it referred to that frustrated techie who set up the rogue Web server without company authorization, coded HTML by hand in a text editor, FTP'd the files to the server, and in his spare time answered all the incoming corporate e-mails, usually also without company authorization." — Brian Wold, "What Happened to the Webmaster? (And other misleading titles)" (May 12, 2006) ii. GOLDEN AGE (1994-2001) The era that conjures "webmaster" most strongly began in the mid 90's, as Beverly Hills Internet was launched, now known as GeoCities. "[T]he point about the web before social networks or before Web 2.0 is not that you had a profile on GeoCities, but that you had a chance to build your cyber home outside of it, you could exist and grow outside of a centralized service." — Olia Lialina, quoted in Cybercultural by Richard MacManus (March 7, 2025) A culture developed as people realized anybody could make their own website. 88x31 buttons, blinkies, .GIFs, web rings, visitor counters, guestbooks. All originate from this time. "In 1996, the web was littered with black-and-yellow-striped animated .gifs reveling in metaphors of road construction... 'This site under construction' was the default home page disclaimer, until everyone realized that the inherent nature of the web was that it would be perpetually under construction." — Fresher Styles for Web Designers, O'Reilly (December 2008) While GeoCities is fondly remembered now, it certainly had its problems and issues. Similarly, there were other platforms at the time as well, such as Tripod, Angelfire, and Homestead. It can be easy to revise history into an idealized monoculture. "It was not a paradise for early web makers. It was not even a good web hosting service. It was free and not worse than others, that's why webmasters endured the pain of clumsy page builders, interventions from commercial scripts being injected into their pages, accidental file deletions, etc…" — "GeoCities' Afterlife and Web History," by Olia Lialin, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (July 30, 2019) Over 38 million pages were deleted when Yahoo shut down the platform in 2009. iii. THE DECLINE (2008-2020) As sites grew and the Internet evolved from the expectation of a handful of HTML files located in /var/www/html/ into instead a complex beast of software and content management systems, the "one person does everything" model stopped being the default, and the title became a culture-war topic among web professionals. Schisms grew from the complexity. The Internet became a vector for business, and then the way to make money as the dotcom bubble inflated. People needed to specialize, whether that was to design for the front-end, or program and administrate the server from the back-end. You needed usability specialists and network engineers and search engine optimizers. Dammit Jim, I’m a Webmaster, not a Digital Government Web Content Communications and Application Development Knowledge Management Specialist! ...or am I? Is the term webmaster an accurate description of the responsibilities of today’s web professional, or is that moniker just a quaint artifact from the simpler, earliest days of the web where someone akin to a similarly quaint notion of a Ringmaster juggled a circus of unwieldy text, spinning logos and blinking text? — David Kitzmiller, FCC Webmaster, Mastering the Web: An Old-Fashioned Notion? (August 12, 2010) Perhaps the clearest and most citable marker of the term's formal retirement from mainstream professional use is when Google rebranded "Google Webmasters" to "Google Search Central" in 2020. An institutional funeral. "Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word 'webmaster' was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They're more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few 'webmasters.' In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there's not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites." — Google Search Central Blog (Nov 12, 2020) Part Two: NOW It is your innate human right to create. All of the above was pretext for this: You can be a webmaster right now. You can create a website right now. Yes, you. Your website can look however you want it to, and function in any way you want. It can have whatever you want on it. You can look up tutorials, and you can have your questions answered by humans just by joining forums, IRC channels, and independent platforms. The act of creating and learning inherently places you in the community. prelude: The Deception Generally speaking, we have been deceived into thinking many broad falsehoods: Regarding the webmaster: The Internet has become too complex for a single person to master all aspects of it. You must use a certain tool or platform to properly be part of this movement. Regarding the Internet: Technology is inherently addictive, and brings us harm. In order to stay connected to others online, we must use corporate social media platforms, become the product, and surrender our privacy. The Internet is primarily falsehoods, misinformation, and meaningless spam content. Regarding us: Most of us are incapable of learning technical, scientific, mathematical concepts. Those of us who are knowledgeable are reluctant to share information, and hostile to beginners. When plainly laid out like this, it's easy to see how we've been conned into a cynical, pessimistic—even misanthropic view of things. Companies worth billions of dollars have a bottom line that depends on the general population to continue believing all of the above. Our perspective on technology and other people has been greatly distorted into the negative. In reality, the Internet has terabytes of high-quality resources to learn from. There are thousands of people just like you looking for connection, hungry for a better vision of the future, wanting to cultivate nourishing hobbies. You are so capable. The idea that one person cannot master all aspects of the web, as the webmaster was once known to, is demonstrably false. Be optimistic about your capabilities and the willingness of others to help you. Be skeptical of anybody who attempts to divide or gatekeep, proclaiming the mandated use or superiority of a specific tool or platform. Likewise, I want to note that searching for "return of the webmaster" in 2026 may lead you to discussions of the "agentic web" or "orchestration," a euphemism for somebody who employs generative AI to do the multidisciplinary work that comes with being a webmaster. Those who manage a stack of expensive large language models, those who are prompt engineers for static site generators, and those who neglect to take the time to learn for themselves, unwilling to put in the effort themselves (or thinking they're incapable to). That's not what this is.