Early Web (1990s)
Learning Objectives
- You know of some of the milestones in web development from the 1990s.
By the early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee, credited for inventing the world wide web, had developed many of the core tools that form the internet as we know it. This included a protocol for transferring text documents between computers (HyperText Transfer Protocol, HTTP), a language for structuring and presenting data on web pages (HyperText Markup Language, HTML), a system for linking documents together (Uniform Resource Locator, URL), a web server to respond to requests, and a web browser capable of displaying HTML pages retrieved from web servers.
In the early 1990s, the web was primarily a platform for serving content. This content was predominantly static, written in HTML, and hosted by web servers. Web pages were largely text-based and featured little to no dynamic content, apart from links to other pages.
Over the decade, web pages began to include more types of content, such as tables and images, and they were styled using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The visual design of web pages became increasingly important as the understanding of the web evolved — web pages were no longer seen merely as sources of information but also as marketing platforms and tools for communication and interaction.
Examples of changes in design can be seen in the Microsoft website from 1996 and 1999 and the Nokia website from 1996 and 1999. These sites are available through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
This evolution included the introduction of client-side scripting languages for web browsers. During this time, companies were battling for the dominance of the web by enhancing browser functionality. As an example, Microsoft developed Internet Explored with ActiveX and VBScript, while Netscape Navigator introduced JavaScript. There were also other efforts to build dynamic content, such as Macromedia Flash. Over time, JavaScript emerged as the dominant client-side scripting language.
For more JavaScript’s growth, see the article JavaScript: the first 20 years.
On the server side, early web servers used ad-hoc code and CGI scripts to create dynamic responses. These scripts, written in languages like Perl or C, ran on the server and could generate dynamic content such as displaying the current time, listing files, or processing data submitted by the user.
The server-side also evolved, although not as rapidly as the client-side (fueled by a battle for the market share with browsers). New language specifically for server-side development emerged, such as PHP (Personal Home Page, released in 1996), ASP (Active Server Pages, released in 1996), and JSP (JavaServer Pages, released in 1999). All of these languages are still used thoday, although ASP has been superceded by ASP.NET.
The late 1990s also saw the rise of the LAMP stack, which combined Linux, Apache Web Server, MySQL Database, and PHP/Perl/Python scripting languages. The stack became a standard for building dynamic web applications, and it is still widely used. Similarly, the Apache Web Server expanded its functionality to allow hosting Java applications (e.g., JSP, as mentioned above), leading to the Apache Tomcat project.