The Straight Dope was also a long-running newspaper column.

Good point, although it also had a very early Usenet prescence, where I first encountered it being in Australia at the time.

Maybe there's a Straight Dope reply to the question of when Cecil and Co first posted on Usenet?

Cool

So it is republished and hosted as a website now?

this web page / site / post must have appeared on WWW much later in that case?

Was originally wondering if this web page is itself published in 1986 (styling /css updates may have come later)

The text of Straight Dope answers appeared in print and on Usenet and is copyright to the date of writing | first publication.

The existing text archives would have been ported forward with their original copyright dates some time post 1989 (when Tim Berners-Lee created his WWW specification) likely at least three or four years on as the practice had to spread outside of CERN, outside of the physics community, and early Mosaic browsers to become popular.