Technology · 2
What distinctive two-tone color scheme did the original CERN website use when the World Wide Web first opened to the public in 1991?
Answer
Black text on a white background
The very first web pages served by CERN's httpd server in 1991 were plain HTML with black text on a white background — no images, no color styling, just raw hyperlinked text. CSS did not exist yet, so all early pages defaulted to the browser's own rendering, which itself defaulted to black-on-white.
💡 Did you know?
The first website ever published — CERN's info.cern.ch — had no images at all; every page was pure hyperlinked text, yet it described a system that would eventually carry billions of images daily.
Other options people guess
- White text on a blue background
- Black text on a grey background
- Green text on a black background
Topics
- 1990s
- world-wide-web
- cern
- internet-history
- web-design
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