Early Web (1990s)
Learning Objectives
- You know of some of the milestones in web development from the 1990s.
- You understand the evolution from static to dynamic web content.
- You are familiar with the early browser wars and their impact on web standards.
- You recognize the key technologies that emerged during this period.
The Birth of the World Wide Web
By the early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had developed the core technologies that form the web as we know it. These included HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) for transferring documents between computers, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for structuring and presenting data, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) for linking documents together, a web server to respond to requests, and a web browser capable of displaying HTML pages.
The first web page went live on August 6, 1991, at CERN in Switzerland, providing information about the World Wide Web project itself. In April 1993, CERN announced that World Wide Web technology would be available for anyone to use on a royalty-free basis. The freedom to use the technology was crucial for the web’s growth and adoption.
The first web page is still accessible at info.cern.ch.
Static Content and Early Adoption
In the early 1990s, the web was primarily a platform for serving static content written in HTML. Web pages were largely text-based with little dynamic functionality apart from hyperlinks, which allowed non-linear exploration of information. Early adopters of the web were mainly academic and research institutions, which used it to share papers, data, and project information. The simplicity of HTML made it easy for anyone with basic technical skills to create and publish web pages.
Early Browsers and Popularization
The web’s adoption accelerated with the release of NCSA Mosaic in 1993. Developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Mosaic was the first widely adopted browser to display images inline with text, making the web more visually appealing and accessible to non-technical users.
Netscape Navigator, released in 1994 by many of the same developers, quickly became the dominant browser, capturing over 80% of the market by mid-1995. Netscape, founded as Mosaic Communications Corporation and initially releasing its browser as Mosaic Netscape, introduced several innovations, including support for cookies and JavaScript.
The Browser Wars
The most significant competition was between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, launched in August 1995. This period, known as the browser wars, saw rapid innovation but also led to fragmentation and compatibility issues.
Microsoft introduced proprietary technologies like ActiveX and VBScript, while Netscape released JavaScript in 1995. Created by Brendan Eich, JavaScript — originally called LiveScript — emerged as the dominant client-side scripting language. Macromedia Flash also became popular for animations and interactive content.
For more on JavaScript’s growth, see JavaScript: the first 20 years.
By the late 1990s, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had captured the majority of the market, aided significantly by its bundling with the Microsoft Windows operating system — a practice that later became the subject of antitrust litigation (see United States vs. Microsoft).
Web Standards and the W3C
The competing visions and proprietary features of the browser wars created significant challenges for web developers who had to write different code for different browsers. In response, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee to develop common standards for the web. The organization began publishing recommendations for HTML, CSS, and other web technologies to ensure the web’s long-term growth through open, vendor-neutral standards that would work across all browsers and platforms.
Visual Evolution and Design
Over the decade, web pages evolved to include tables, images, and styling through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). First proposed in 1994 and becoming a W3C recommendation in 1996, CSS allowed developers to separate content from presentation. However, early browser support was limited and inconsistent, often leading to designers to rely on HTML tables for layout purposes.
The visual design of web pages became increasingly important as the web evolved from a simple information source to a platform for marketing and interaction. Designers experimented with background images, animated GIFs, visitor counters, and guestbooks. This era, sometimes called “Web 1.0,” is now considered nostalgic, characterized by tiled backgrounds, bright colors, and “under construction” graphics.
Examples of design evolution can be seen in the Microsoft website from 1996 and 1999 and the Nokia website from 1996 and 1999 through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Personal Web Pages and Online Communities
The mid-to-late 1990s saw the rise of personal web pages and early online communities. Services like GeoCities (founded in 1994) and Tripod offered free web hosting, allowing individuals to create websites without technical knowledge or significant resources. Forms of online communities started to emerge through web forums, email lists, and IRC channels.
Search Engines and Web Portals
As the web grew rapidly, finding information became increasingly challenging. Early directories like Yahoo!, launched in 1994, initially cataloged websites manually in hierarchical categories before evolving into a major web portal offering news, email, and various services.
The late 1990s saw the emergence of automated search engines. AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, and Ask Jeeves competed for users’ attention.
The PageRank algorithm, which ranked pages based on their links from other pages, was a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. In 1998, they founded Google, which used PageRank and provided a clean, minimalist interface. Google quickly rose to dominance, becoming the leading search engine by the early 2000s.
E-Commerce and the Dot-Com Boom
The 1990s also witnessed the birth of e-commerce. Amazon launched in 1995 as an online bookstore, while eBay started as an auction site the same year. These companies pioneered online retail and peer-to-peer commerce respectively. Secure transactions became possible with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, enabling safe transmission of credit card information. Other early ventures included PayPal (founded in 1998) for online payments.
The late 1990s were characterized by the dot-com boom, during which significant amounts of venture capital flowed into internet-related startups. Stock prices soared, and many companies went public at unprecedented valuations. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001.
Server-Side Technologies
Early web servers used ad-hoc code and CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts — written in languages like Perl or C — to generate dynamic content. CGI scripts were powerful but often inefficient, as each request spawned a new process.
New languages specifically for server-side development emerged: PHP (released in 1995), ASP (Active Server Pages, 1996), and JSP (JavaServer Pages, 1999). PHP became particularly popular due to its ease of use and tight integration with HTML. The late 1990s also saw the rise of the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), which became a standard for building dynamic web applications and remains widely used today.
Summary
In summary:
- Tim Berners-Lee introduced the key technologies of the web; HTTP, HTML, and URLs, and CERN made the technology freely available in 1993.
- Early browsers like Mosaic (1993) and Netscape Navigator (1994) popularized the web and sparked the browser wars with Internet Explorer (1995).
- Web design evolved with CSS (1996), enabling separation of content from presentation, though early adoption was inconsistent.
- Web publishing became available to anyone through services like GeoCities, and early online communities formed over forums and IRC.
- Search engines were created to help navigate the web, with Google’s PageRank algorithm significantly improving search quality by also evaluating how pages linked to each other.
- E-commerce took off on the web with companies like Amazon and eBay (both 1995), and the dot-com boom drove massive investment to companies focusing on the web (although the bubble burst in 2000-2001).
- Server-side technologies evolved with PHP, ASP, and JSP, while the LAMP stack became a development standard.