The Secret Lives of Web Pages

Book excerpt: Every day billions of people view billions of web pages. A blank rectangle in a web browser transforms into the Guardian, or Google, or, God help us, Yahoo! News. That single home page is often the work of hundreds of people over thousands of hours. A single page of the Huffington Post is more complex than the space shuttle. And yet most people don't know what's behind a web page. Paul Ford knows how the web works, every bit of it. He was one of the first bloggers - he started well before the term "blog" was coined, and so programmed all his own web publishing software himself - and he is now a well-respected programmer. In The Secret Lives of Web Pages, he explains what happens when a web page loads into your browser, from the basic text and headlines to the moment your identity can be stolen, in an engaging, funny, smart, and accessible way, from a place of love and wonder and with deep historical understanding. Based on his own experience and extensive conversations with a who's who of Internet creators, The Secret Lives of Web Pages is the definitive book on coding and the web page: what it is, why it happened, and how to understand it.