Week 225 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2022-02-14.
I've really enjoyed the trip down memory lane that the Web Development History blog brings. Not only highlighting the earliest of days for the web and HTML, but the evolution of some of the browsers we were using back in the 90s.
I was a Netscape user and advocate early on, but IE took over and it felt like we were all taking the next step forward on the world wide web.
As the mid-2000s rolled around I was using Firefox and by the time the decade was out I'd switched to Google Chrome. Until recently I've been a Chrome user (still use it for debugging), but I'm trying to use Safari when I can. Battery life is so much better and password management works brilliantly when it comes to both macOS and iOS.
There's a bit of back-and-forth between the years as different topics are covered but every article has been really interesting to read.
I had no idea that Yahoo! was built on top of Perl or that it started out as a literal guide to the internet.
The article that brought me the most nostalgia of all was the one that looked at the rise of DHTML in 1997. This is around the time I really began to pay attention to the web as a means of creation, rather than just consumption. I was building HTML pages by hand, sprinkles of JavaScript here and there and then at the turn of the century I started to get familiar with CSS.
DHTML is when the web started to become so much richer. I borrowed many books from the library and read up on DHTML, HTML and eventually XHTML. There was no Stack Overflow (or Google for that matter) it wasn't until the early-2000s that I would come across W3Schools.
Looking back just 20 years, the web has evolved in some almost unimaginable ways. Looks back 30 years and it was just so... primitive. For me, the web peaked about a decade ago and has now turned into an unwieldy beast when it comes to rolling out architecture.
Tags: development, history, web