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 PASTThe 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. Part Two: NOWIt is your innate human right to create.

All of the above was pretext for this: You can be a webmaster right now. You can create a website right now. Yes, you.

Your website can look however you want it to, and function in any way you want. It can have whatever you want on it. You can look up tutorials, and you can have your questions answered by humans just by joining forums, IRC channels, and independent platforms.

The act of creating and learning inherently places you in the community.