Early Web JavaScript History

Impressive. Web was very primitive back then compared to how it is today. I think there was no flex, no grids, no ESM modules even.It might not sound impressive in 2024 but back then, it was a huge deal. Very daring to even attempt something like that IMHO.It was a time of YUI, jQuery, ExtJS, script.aculo.us and such.

The web was invented in 1989, became a public project in 1991, and JavaScript support for it appeared in 1995, Java Applets the same year, with Flash and ActiveX following in 1996. So it was a static document model for ~6 years, and an app platform for ~27 years.

Browsers weren't written in a day. Technically speaking, Mozilla Firefox is a ship of Theseus going back to the release of Netscape in 1994. Did browser and internet infrastructure developers in the early 90s understand that these things would become rich application platforms? Looking at the history of HTTP, it's clear that they expected some concept of "application" to be delivered through the browser. While there's certainly a chance at least a few of them foresaw the

- Netscape, IE, Opera.. Firefox started to emerge around that time too.- The javascript complexity that can run in browsers is an achievement. Relatively speaking, flash was the one runtime Java promised to be, and Java applets however clunky looking back were as futuristic as today's tools are in some use cases.- Responsive flash apps were perfectly possible if you wanted. Most never learnt that though. That resolution was painful tho.- Ajax apps are the original JavaScript apps.

That’s the period of time that html and JavaScript was static or stagnant depending on your perspective

I think that part refers to the web around 2000. JavaScript was definitely around and being used in a limited extent similar to what the article describes at that point.

In the 90s many things were only possible with ActiveX or Java Applets. ActiveX just had the nice side effect of only running on Windows and IE. But, it's important to remember browsers were much much less capable than they are today. I was writing 'webapps' and manipulating the dom and javascript was sloooow (on both IE or FF). One hack I did was have the server dynamically writing js code (instead of doing something on the client) and doing htmx like we see making a comeback tod

Since the mid 90s Internet Explorer & Netscape had aiff support and autoplay and Javascript 1.0. We had some good times.https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/

Not being snarky, but was anyone still saying this about the web in 2006 when it was 13 years old? Going from Mosaic to what we had in 2006 was quite a bit more effort than a JavaScript framework - multiple browser engines and JS frameworks themselves were created in that time. Not to mention JavaScript itself.

I'd been building increasingly sophisticated CGI-based web apps at the time (as a hobby) and still remember being blown away with what appeared to be a fully functional email client running inside Netscape. This was before Javascript was commonly available or standardized, and certainly no XmlHttpRequest etc.