Client-Side – Web Development History

September 29, 2021 by Richard MacManus

1996: Flash and CSS Bring Design to the Web

There were two stylistically opposed approaches to web design, epitomized by two distinct — and utterly different — technologies, both of which debuted in 1996. The first, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), represented structure. Design elements were to be encoded in a new language, CSS, as defined in a W3C web standards specification. The over-riding principle was separation of content and presentation, with content marked up in HTML and presentation in CSS. At the other end of the web design spectrum was the animation tool Flash, in which presentation and content were mashed together in one file.

June 2, 2021 by Richard MacManus

1997: The Year of DHTML

DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, was essentially a combination of HTML, JavaScript, the newly released CSS standard, and an emerging web programming model called the DOM (Document Object Model). That said, the precise definition of DHTML depended on which browser company you spoke to: Netscape or Microsoft.

As it turned out, Microsoft’s vision for DHTML was more compelling from a technical perspective than Netscape’s (perhaps the first time that could be said about a web technology Microsoft pioneered — but it would not the last). What Microsoft wanted to achieve with DHTML was to make every element of an HTML document into a programmable object.

May 4, 2021 by Richard MacManus

1997: JavaScript Grows Up and Developers Push the Boundaries

By the start of 1997, JavaScript had become a regular topic for tech reference websites and books. JavaScript was now a sophisticated language, with new features like layers adding a further dynamic dimension to its capabilities.

January 5, 2021 by Richard MacManus

1996: JavaScript Annoyances and Meeting the DOM

For all of the technical wizardry in Netscape Navigator 2.0, when it was first released JavaScript was put to use in fairly trivial ways — scrolling text, silly animations, tricks with colors (fading, rainbow effects, and so on). Inventor Brendan Eich called these initial use cases “annoyances.” But there was also an underlying power, especially with the beginnings of the DOM.

December 22, 2020 by Richard MacManus 1 comment

1995: The Birth of JavaScript

JavaScript was invented in a two-week flurry in May 1995 by Brendan Eich, at the time a newly hired developer at browser company Netscape. The project was initiated by Netscape because of a desire to extend the early Web beyond the limits of HTML. In particular, Netscape wanted to add interactivity to websites. JavaScript ended up being the solution and this post explores how that came to be.