Inside Tim Berners-Lee's first website on its 25th birthday

The 'World Wide Web' information page is still alive and kicking

The first ever website in the world - coded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN - is 25 years old today.

Berners-Lee, by his own admission, "just" had to take the concept of hypertext linking - as developed in the 1960s - and convince CERN that widespread use of this idea between organisations and institutions could result in a globe-spanning network of information.

Using Steve Jobs' NeXT computer to throw together a primitive web browser, Berners-Lee subsequently built the first functioning website to run in it.

"World Wide Web" was uploaded to the Berners-Lee's invention (now commonly known - if technically incorrectly - as "the internet" and not, as many marketing-types tried to call it the "information superhighway") on 20 December 1990, and is lovingly preserved on CERN's website for posterity.

Fittingly, the site serves as a very basic manual to the workings of the World Wide Web, containing nuggets of wisdom that still hold true to this day.

"There is no 'top' to the World Wide Web," wrote Berners-Lee. "You can look at it from many points of view," he continued, before stating that with "no other bias" there were some ways of "looking for information".

Preceding search engines, what followed was a short list of topics, including "Aeronautics", "Bio Sciences", "Computing" (hooray!),"Libraries" and "Religion".

Cat photos, amusing GIFs, hardcore pornography and vlogging would not arrive for several more years, but Berners-Lee was off to a reasonable start.

It was also possible to consult a list of organisations, with CERN, the Helsinki Technical University and MIT riding high on an admittedly very short list of interconnected institutions.

Berners-Lee's index of functioning "W3" (the way WWW was originally dubbed) servers still contains functioning links to Cornell University's law department homepage - though its original URL containing "fatty.law.edu" now redirects - as well as the venerable SunSite information archive, which now forwards instead to iblio.org, which is doing commendably similar archiving work.

A section that hasn't fared so well with the passing of time is Berners-Lee's "Data sources not yet on-line" section, which suggests signing up to CERN mailing lists, consulting Telnet sites, or forwarding to Archie - a program that polls anonymous FTP sites. Work on Archie ceased in the late 1990s, but the spirit of this comic-themed early search engine continued with projects named Jughead and Veronica.

Jughead is actually still around as an open-source search project, but is now known as Jugtail due to obvious copyright reasons.

Berners-Lee also offers some sage counsel on web etiquette, including a reminder to "give the status of the information". He continues: "Some information is definitive, some is hastily put together and incomplete," forecasting the contents of popular list features and tabloid news sites by a good 15 years.

However, he (quite rightly) states that "both are useful to readers, so do not be shy to put information up which is incomplete or out of date" as long as the status of the information is correctly flagged.

He also suggests "refer back" links to earlier pages or more general data, as well "a root page for outsiders", which we still generally call a "landing page" and which - try as many might to improvise - is still seen as the standard way to create a website.

A page named "How can I help?" suggests ways in which we, working as a great big team, can help the World Wide Web "grow and be even more useful".

Suggestions include "Put up some data" - raw, in the form of hypertext or plain text files, or even smart servers that link to further databases. You could even ask someone you know who has a database whether they'd consider connecting it.

Managing "a subject area" that you know a lot about or even writing some software are also, suggests Berners-Lee, a great way to get things moving forward.

It's unarguable that the world rose to these challenges, and 25 years down the line, it's resulted in an unrecognisable internet as business, marketing, opportunism and pure, wonderful stupidity has seeped in to raise the modern internet infinitely beyond its humble, academic roots.

So this Christmas Day, when you're sitting on your sofa, iPad in hand, watching Zoella's sponsored festive beauty haul or enjoying photos of your friend's dog eating some tinsel, perhaps raise a glass of sherry to Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his clever invention from a quarter of a century ago. Without it, the world would be a pretty different place.