History of the WWW
1941 - The Garden of Forking Paths - a short story by Jorge Luis Borges - an
inspiration for the concept of hypertext
Jul 1945 - As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic Monthly - Introduces
the idea of hypertext
1960 - Project Xanadu by Ted Nelson - First hypertext project
1963 - Ted Nelson coins the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia'
1967 - HES (Hypertext Editing System) by Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and
Brown University students - First hypertext system available on
commercial equipment that novices could use
Dec 1968 - NLS (oN-Line System) by Douglas Engelbart - Graphical use/demo of
hypertext links
1969 - GML (Generalized Markup Language)
1980 - SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)
- ENQUIRE by Tim Berners-Lee - A simple hypertext program resembling a
wiki
Mar 1989 - WWW Project Proposal
Dec 1990 - 1st Website (TBL CERN WWW)
- 1st Web Browser (WorldWideWeb) - NeXTSTEP, white backgrounds, pointer
cursor doesn't change over links, each link opens in a new window,
WYSIWYG editor.
Mar 1991 - Perl 4
Oct 1991 - HTML Tags (13 tags, 9 persisting) [My Review]
- 1st reference to a "Home page" (www-talk)
Dec 1991 - 2nd Website (Stanford)
- ViolaWWW Browser - "Visually Interactive Object-oriented Language
and Application". It's Unix, HyperCard inspired - custom inline
images, custom forms, a custom stylesheets implementation, a
custom scripting language, a custom frames implementation
Feb 1992 - 3rd Website (Dutch National Institute)
Jun 1992 - www-talk mailing list blows up
Jul 1992 - 1st Pic on the Web (Cernettes)
Dec 1992 - MacWWW (Samba) - first Mac browser,though it's text-based. Code
borrowed from line mode browser to Think-C.
1992 - 50-60 websites
Jan 1993 - NCSA X Mosaic 0.5 - For Unix (X/Motif)
- First use of the term "web site"
Mar 1993 - NCSA Mosaic 0.9 - JPEG support (linked)
- NCSA Mosaic 0.10 - IMG tag (inline gif images)
Apr 1993 - Marc Andreesen posts "A Beginner's Guide to HTML"
Jun 1993 - NCSA Mosaic 1.1 - Image map support, cite, blockquote, var
- RFC for Stylesheets for HTML
- First Proposal for HTML spec (52 tags) [My Review]
- Cello - First web browser for Windows
Jul 1993 - First reference to a "Homepage"
- HTML+ spec draft
Sep 1993 - NCSA Mosaic for Windows 0.5a
Nov 1993 - NCSA Mosaic 2.0 - Fill-out forms, br, hr
- NCSA Mosaic for Macintosh 1.0
- NCSA Mosaic for Windows 1.0
- HTML+ (92 tags) [My Review]
Dec 1993 - CGI
1993 - 623 websites (including MTV, Wired, Bloomberg, IMDB)
Jan 1994 - NCSA Mosaic for Windows 2.0 alpha 1
Feb 1994 - robots.txt
Apr 1994 - Mosaic Communications incorporated (Jim Clark & Andreessen)
- NCSA Mosaic for X 2.4 - Last meaningful Unix version
Jun 1994 - NCSA Mosaic for Mac 2.0 alpha 1 - Editable URL bar (hidden
by default)
- SPRY AIR Mosaic - First commercial NCSA Mosaic product (can type
URL directly into URL bar, in-app options, big colorful toolbar
buttons, stop button, pretty throbber, links are underlined)
- NCSA Mosaic for Windows 2.0 alpha 5 - Editable URL bar
Jul 1994 - NCSA Mosaic for Windows 2.0 alpha 6 - UI change to single
editable address bar
Aug 1994 - First web pizza orders (PizzaNet by Pizza Hut/SCO in Santa Cruz)
- Spyglass Mosaic - Second commercial NCSA Mosaic product, OEM
versions [Enhanced/Ventana/Luckman/PATHWORKS etc Mosaic], etc),
multi-platform new code base (licensed only name and tech from
NCSA)
Sep 1994 - First NetScape betas (0.4-0.6) - See pages and images as they
load (modem optimization)
Sep 1994 - Netscape HTML Extensions
Oct 1994 - Netscape 0.9 - inline jpegs, cookies (undocumented)
- Perl 5
Nov 1994 - HTML 2 draft
- Arena (browser) - background images, tables, text flow around images
1994 - 10,000 websites
Mar 1995 - Netscape 1.1 - tables, background images (background, bgcolor)
Apr 1995 - HTML 3 draft
May 1995 - MySQL
Jun 1995 - PHP
Aug 1995 - Internet Explorer
Sep 1995 - Netscape 2 - Javascript, Java, frames, font colors, div,
looping animated GIF, super/sub-script, plug-ins
Oct 1995 - Internet Explorer 2
Nov 1995 - HTML 2 standard
1995 - Macromedia Shockwave Plug-in
Mar 1996 - IE 3 - CSS
Aug 1996 - Netscape 3
Dec 1996 - CSS1 standard
Jan 1997 - HTML 3 standard
Apr 1997 - IE 4
Jun 1997 - Netscape 4 (Communicator)
Nov 1997 - CSS2
Dec 1997 - HTML 4 standard
Jun 1998 - IE 5
Aug 1998 - Flash
Jun 1999 - CSS3
Jun 2005 - Sitemaps
Jan 2008 - HTML 5 draft
Oct 2014 - HTML 5 standard
Interesting Things to Know
- The Gray Web (1992-1999) - In the 90's a blank or basic webpage was gray. It's just the way it was. How did it come to be that way though? Who decided *that* gloominess should be the default color?? Well, interestingly, the original web browser (actually named WorldWideWeb) ran on the NeXTSTEP OS and presented the web with a white background (turns out this original vision was a bit ahead of it's time). Meanwhile, the vast majority of early web users were scientific research/academia institutions, which used Unix systems, so the subsequent early browsers were written for Unix, where the the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) had just become all the rage. CDE used the Motif UI toolkit, which had a default gray background. By the time the dominant NCSA Mosaic browser was ported to Windows/Mac, that gray had become the standard/expected "look" of the web - so much so that it was hard-coded as the background color in the Windows and Mac ports. Remember, this is before there was an option to have a custom background color/pattern/image. Your website was gray and that's how you liked it. Netscape, which took over from Mosaic, continued this hard-coding of gray background. By the way, that hard-coded gray was #c0c0c0 (which is actually "silver", but doesn't really look all that silver, right?) And so it was for years. Then one day in 1997, along comes Internet Explorer 4... with a default background color of... of... of white!? Trust me, it was a double-take moment, followed by a suspicious squinting of the eyes and a raised eyebrow, followed by an "Ok... maybe?" user reaction. A philisophical moment was forced upon us, where at first it seemed so blasphamous for a browser to use a non-gray default background, but then made us for the first time respect a different view, and hence to think about our gray, and ask why it is such in the first place... gray!? A gray/white default split existed between Netscape and IE for the next couple years, which didn't matter *too* much because by that time almost all websites had custom background images (yes, images!) or colors. Some people were even starting to use CSS! By mid-1999, IE4 with it's default white background took over the web browser market from Netscape, and the default basic web page has had a white background ever since. Now you know.
- "HTML 3.0 (aka HTML+)" says ViolaWWW start page
- There was no carriage return (<BR>) in original HTML tags!
- Lots of early web servers actually ran on port 8001... I think because lots
of UNIX systems only allowed root to bind the first 1024 ports
Uncertified Websites
That is, non-https sites still functioning on port 80 (will work in ancient/original browsers)