WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone · brennan.day

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1: 'Liberty Leading the People' by Eugène Delacroix ca. 1830 | Wikimedia Commons // 2: Windows 98 Themes posted by /u/2ezyo | Reddit (edited by the Author)

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. (May 1997)

This RFC—alongside (required by RFC 822)—is what cemented "webmaster" as the canonical, protocol-level point-of-contact role for a website.

"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...