"The web went public on August 6, 1991 and the first release of Windows 3.1 was on March 18, 1992."

Pedant alert!

The fact remains that during the first few years of the web, most individuals who were enterprising enough to figure out how to create a web site were using a system that had DOS-style 8.3 filenames. Eventually NT4 and Windows95 brought long filenames to those who upgraded.
(I was using OS/2 then, and NT and Linux later, but that definitely put me in a minority)

Anahata