The history of Web development

Historic milestones in web development

Let's start our overall review of the key trends that are currently affecting modern web development with a look at the historic milestones that enabled us to get to where we are today:

The Mosaic browser

Mosaic wasn’t the first browser, but it was the one that popularized the Internet for many. Released in 1993, it supported bookmarks and inline image. Before Mosaic images had to be downloaded and viewed separately from page content. Mosaic was, at the time, the most user friendly browser available by some degree. It allowed non technical users to understand the web for the first time.

Cookies

Support for cookies, tiny files that can store a web users preferences, were first supported by what was then the Mosaic Netscape browser in 1994. Whilst they have over the years gained a bad reputation for tracking user activity online, they have actually played a huge role in adding a layer of programmatic sophistication to the web. Such has been their impact we are only now implementing improved web storage methods to replace their use.

CSS

CSS, as we know it today, came along in 1994. It was proposed by the Opera browser CTO Hakon Wium Lie. Somewhat of a web pioneer, Hakon has since played key roles in the adoption of both downloadable fonts and the HTML tag. Whilst the separation of presentation and content that CCS facilitates is something we now take for granted, those who remember the mess HTML tables made of the web will forever be grateful for the day the W3C approved ‘CSS Level 1’4.

PHP

It is hard to imagine a World Wide Web without PHP, yet before 1996 that is exactly what we had. Quickly adopted upon its release as an core web language (it runs on a server, can be embedded in HTML and supports SQL databases) the language is now used on over 80% of all  websites.

AJAX

It isn’t often that Microsoft is attributed with changing the web for the better, but with AJAX that is exactly what they did. Their implementation of a technique called XMLHTTP in the Outlook web application paved the way for what we now call AJAX. This technique allows web browsers to fetch new data without refreshing the page, giving web apps the ability to act much more like their desktop counterparts.