I was a webmaster for my uni (trying to handle the abhorrent monstrosities of Typo3) and some other unis around here (WordPress and Joomla), all of them while juggling with several other tasks (web development, graphic design, etc., etc.).
"Webmaster" being the person who adds, updates and deletes contents on a daily basis, and fixes misc, small issues with both frontend and backend. Or at least that's how that word has been used in those environments I've worked. My contracts listed that among web dev, graphic design and other tasks, one of them was doing webmaster duties.
With that in mind I feel like the author is extrapolating the concept quite a bit - one of the first quotes in the first part acknowledges that a "webmaster" is kind of a website administrator. Granted, in my case I learned some stuff "by force" because I had to deal with several stupid problems, and many of them that I caused by myself; but at no time I was supposed that my task was to make the website do something it was not supposed to do. It's rather a stressful job (believe it or not), as with pretty much anything web development related. But the point is that we as webmasters can't do much to do the truly thing that can save the current web, to reclaim it back from the greedy hands of the giant corpos.
Looking at the code and the website, you can tell it was hand-coded: the HTML, CSS, and even the JS (few people use DOMNode.style.display = 'none/block' these days, and I doubt an AI would suggest doing that). An impressive leading by example.
I find this perceived timeline fascinating. As a computer nerd millennial, I have a passing familiarity with it while also living in a parallel universe. None of this manifesto resonates with me at all.
The web became more important to me in the early 2000s. Everything before that is kinda hazy. I never cared about social media apart from briefly having a myspace page. Before even that I had already set up a couple of websites for school clubs and whatnot. I must have been around 11 when I got started. I've always considered making a website to be fairly trivial, and the title of "webmaster" pretentious.
The topic and role kept expanding in the 2010s to include responsive design, apps, etc. It wasn't that hard to keep up with, so I shrugged my shoulders and started a career in it. I didn't see the big deal then or now, but clearly the counterculture and tech bros did and they made a ton of noise.
It's now 2026, and I still let those noisy people pay me pretty damn well. More recently, I've watched the soulless sand-encrusted robot hands of beached LLMs struggle and crawl at my feet. I continue to stand here at the otherwise calm shores with a pair of binoculars looking for what the big deal is.
EDIT - okay I reread it, and I guess there is this sentence I agree with: "The idea that one person cannot master all aspects of the web, as the webmaster was once known to, is demonstrably false."
I was a webmaster for my uni (trying to handle the abhorrent monstrosities of Typo3) and some other unis around here (WordPress and Joomla), all of them while juggling with several other tasks (web development, graphic design, etc., etc.).
"Webmaster" being the person who adds, updates and deletes contents on a daily basis, and fixes misc, small issues with both frontend and backend. Or at least that's how that word has been used in those environments I've worked. My contracts listed that among web dev, graphic design and other tasks, one of them was doing webmaster duties.
With that in mind I feel like the author is extrapolating the concept quite a bit - one of the first quotes in the first part acknowledges that a "webmaster" is kind of a website administrator. Granted, in my case I learned some stuff "by force" because I had to deal with several stupid problems, and many of them that I caused by myself; but at no time I was supposed that my task was to make the website do something it was not supposed to do. It's rather a stressful job (believe it or not), as with pretty much anything web development related. But the point is that we as webmasters can't do much to do the truly thing that can save the current web, to reclaim it back from the greedy hands of the giant corpos.
Looking at the code and the website, you can tell it was hand-coded: the HTML, CSS, and even the JS (few people use DOMNode.style.display = 'none/block' these days, and I doubt an AI would suggest doing that). An impressive leading by example.
I find this perceived timeline fascinating. As a computer nerd millennial, I have a passing familiarity with it while also living in a parallel universe. None of this manifesto resonates with me at all.
The web became more important to me in the early 2000s. Everything before that is kinda hazy. I never cared about social media apart from briefly having a myspace page. Before even that I had already set up a couple of websites for school clubs and whatnot. I must have been around 11 when I got started. I've always considered making a website to be fairly trivial, and the title of "webmaster" pretentious.
The topic and role kept expanding in the 2010s to include responsive design, apps, etc. It wasn't that hard to keep up with, so I shrugged my shoulders and started a career in it. I didn't see the big deal then or now, but clearly the counterculture and tech bros did and they made a ton of noise.
It's now 2026, and I still let those noisy people pay me pretty damn well. More recently, I've watched the soulless sand-encrusted robot hands of beached LLMs struggle and crawl at my feet. I continue to stand here at the otherwise calm shores with a pair of binoculars looking for what the big deal is.
EDIT - okay I reread it, and I guess there is this sentence I agree with: "The idea that one person cannot master all aspects of the web, as the webmaster was once known to, is demonstrably false."