The birth of the web — the history of web development

As a web developer you work with technologies younger than many of your colleagues. The web as we know it was conceived in the late 1980s yet the trade has already undergone several complete transformations. Knowing that history is not nostalgia — it explains why HTML CSS and JavaScript look as they do and why they are kept separate.

§A proposal on a computer at CERN

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, working at the research centre CERN in Switzerland, wrote a note called 'Information Management: A Proposal'. The problem he wanted to solve was mundane: researchers had documents scattered across many computers and could not easily refer to each other's work. His solution was hypertext — text with links you could click on — laid on top of the internet, which already existed. In 1990 he built the three things that are still the foundation: a language to describe pages (HTML), an address to find them (the URL) and a way to fetch them (HTTP). The first website went live at the end of 1990, and in 1991 he invited others to join.

§How the early web looked

The first websites were static documents: plain text headings and links without colours or layout worth mentioning. The browser fetched an HTML file and displayed it as it was. There was no CSS to style it and no JavaScript to make it interactive. If you wanted to change something you changed the document and uploaded it again. It sounds primitive but it was precisely the simplicity that made the web spread so quickly — everyone could learn to write a page in a simple text editor.

§CSS separates appearance from content

As pages became prettier, people started mixing appearance into HTML with colour and font codes directly in the content. It quickly became messy and impossible to maintain. The solution came in 1994 when Håkon Wium Lie proposed CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): a separate language just for appearance. It introduced one of the trade's most important habits — separating structure (HTML) from style (CSS) — so you could change a page's appearance without touching the content. That separation is still good code practice today.

§JavaScript and browser wars

The web still lacked life: a page could not respond to the user without fetching everything from scratch. In 1995, Brendan Eich at Netscape was tasked with creating a small programming language for the browser. He built the first version in only around ten days; it was first called Mocha, then LiveScript, and became JavaScript at the official release in late 1995. Now a page could respond to clicks, validate forms and change itself while the user used it.

But a difficult time followed: the browser wars. Netscape and Microsoft's Internet Explorer fought over the market and supported HTML, CSS and JavaScript each in their own way. A page that worked in one browser could be broken in the other, and developers wasted enormous amounts of time trying to make the same thing work in multiple places. To bring peace, JavaScript was submitted for standardisation, and it became the ECMA-262 standard in 1997 — an important step towards the language behaving consistently everywhere.

§From static pages to living applications

The next shift was that a page could fetch new data without the entire page being reloaded. The technique — often called AJAX — made it possible to build web that felt like a program rather than a document: maps that scroll inboxes that update themselves forms that respond immediately. The web shifted from showing pages to running applications. At the same time the standards for HTML and CSS received a major boost so browsers gradually behaved more alike and could do more without helper programs.

§Frameworks, JavaScript on the server and the modern web

As web applications became larger, libraries and frameworks emerged that took the heavy lifting from the developer and provided common ways to build user interfaces. JavaScript also broke out of the browser: with server-side JavaScript you could suddenly use the same language on both frontend and backend. Mobile changed everything again — as users came from small screens, responsive design and accessibility became a fundamental discipline rather than a luxury. The profession today is just as much about tools, version control, security, performance, and accessibility as it is about writing the three core languages.

§Timeline — the major shift in web development

§What the story teaches a web developer

Web development has gone from one document on a single computer to being the engine behind virtually everything we do online. The pace of change is the trade's hallmark: tools and frameworks come and go, but the basic ideas laid at the beginning — separate content, appearance and behaviour, build robust, and let the page work for everyone — have held all the way. When you learn the trade today, you learn both the stable foundations and the habit of keeping up, and history has taught us both are necessary.

“The web started as a way for researchers to share documents. That it became all that other stuff was because the foundation was simple enough that anyone could build on it.”

— Professional view on the origins of the web.