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WorldWideWeb: a new lightweight and free web server!

A very cool little project for Mac and iOS – something that smartly helps fill the gaps left by the decline of web sharing and self-hosting following the Internet's early popularization. Craig Hockenberry has called it "WorldWideWeb" as a direct reference to web history. You fire it up, see one small and simple window, point it to a folder, it gives you a short local web address, and you can load the address in your browser as though you were visiting a live web page. Just about any browser can load and display an HTML file on the local disk, but using WorldWideWeb gives you a couple of advantages: its own web address acts like a live domain (so your browser's address bar won't be filled with the entire on-disk path to the file you loaded), and the same address is accessible to other devices on your local network, so you can develop on your Mac and view the results in parallel on your Android tablet, for example. (As Craig highlights, you can even, finally, have a half-decent web dev environment all on the iPad by involving one of its selection of decent text-editing apps.)

The server itself uses a Swift framework for simple requests and returns, so this isn't the tool for sites that rely on server-side programming. But it's great for people working mainly with core HTML5 languages – if you're doing a static site, or a site for Neocities, or whatever, then it's really simple and clean.

Thanks, Craig. 🥮