DOM – Web Development History

June 30, 2021 by Richard MacManus 1 comment

1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP

It may seem like Microsoft won the browser war in 1998 (despite a looming anti-trust case), but looking back it, was actually the year the web started to open up. It was when open source projects like Mozilla and open standards like DOM began to steer the web towards a more open, equitable future. It was also the year that a coalition of independent web developers arrived on the scene to promote open standards — The Web Standards Project (WaSP). All of these developments would impact the web’s direction for years to come.

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.

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.