A faithful recreation of WorldWideWeb — Tim Berners-Lee's 1990 browser on the NeXT (the one he renamed Nexus so people wouldn't confuse the app with the Web itself) — rebuilt as a window manager over your own pod. One self-contained HTML file, no build, signs in with the universal xlogin pill.
WorldWideWeb wasn't just the first browser — it was a browser and an editor:
the read-write web. That's exactly what Solid is
bringing back, so nexus is built to grow into the real thing, in phases.
- NeXTSTEP chrome — draggable, resizable grey windows on the teal workspace, beveled toolbars, the floating top-left menu. Modelled on CERN's 2019 recreation.
- Real WWW typography — the genuine NeXT webfonts, self-hosted (~74KB total).
- Tim's actual rendering — documents are styled from his 1991
default.style(H1Helvetica-Bold 18,H214,H3Helvetica-Oblique 14,addressoblique 12, …), and links are drawn boxed + underlined as they were in 1990.
- Open any URL in a window (a pod resource, or any readable web page) and read it in true WorldWideWeb style.
- Click boxed links to follow them; < / > walk your history.
- New spawns another window; drag title bars to move, drag the corner to size.
- Containers are clickable — a pod folder (any URL ending
/) renders as a WWW-style index of boxed links (sorted folders-first, with size/date), so you click through your pod like hypertext.../walks up. - HTML renders faithfully; data resources (Turtle, JSON-LD, text) show as source — but every URL in them is a live link, so the whole pod stays click-through.
- Scripts/styles in fetched pages are stripped — nexus draws the document, the page can't take over the chrome.
Cross-origin pages may refuse reads (CORS); your own pod always works.
The read-write turn. On any HTML document you can write to:
- Hit Edit (or ⌘E) — the document becomes editable right in the window; change the text, headings, anything.
- Save (⌘S) writes it straight back to your pod (
PUT). The original<head>/<title>is preserved; your edited body is swapped in. - Revert discards and reloads. A
403/401is reported as no write access. - Open a URL that doesn't exist yet on your pod → nexus offers to create it (edit a blank page, Save to bring it into being).
- Data resources (Turtle, JSON-LD, text) are editable as source and saved with their original content type.
Editing strips page scripts from the rendered body (nexus draws documents, not
apps); the saved file keeps its original <head>. Use it for prose/pages.
.md pages (the pages app's convention:
<name>.md under /public/pages/) render in the WWW style via marked — headings
in the NeXT fonts, links boxed. [[Name]] / [[Name|label]] become clickable
links to the sibling <Name>.md; click a missing one and nexus offers to create
it (wiki-style). Edit drops to the raw markdown source; Save writes it back
as text/markdown. So nexus is a faithful viewer and editor for your pages/wiki.
The signature WorldWideWeb move, the thing that made it a read-write web:
- Open the page you want to link to and choose Mark Document (⌘M) — it's held as the marked target (shown under the menu).
- Go to the page you're writing, hit Edit, select some text, then
Link to Marked (⌘L) — nexus wraps your selection in an
<a href>to the marked target. Save and the link is written to your pod. - You can mark a page that doesn't exist yet, link to it, then create it (P2's create-on-404) — authoring a little web by hand, exactly like 1990.
- A Style menu (bold / headings) for richer editing.
- Mark a selection as a named-anchor target (deep links within a page).
Static — open index.html, or install via the store to /public/apps/nexus/.
AGPL-3.0-only.