Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, the first version of HTML came to life in 1991. At that time it supported only text and consisted of just 18 tags. It seems too little for these days but that was a great first step in building websites almost thirty years ago.
To make websites more attractive and increase readability – Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) was developed. Then the challenge appeared – most browsers weren’t compliant with CSS specifications. What was looking good in one browser was unappealing in the other. Even the most favored at that time Internet Explorer could poorly implement several CSS features. The problem with supporting multiple browsers had to be solved. The Web Standards Project and the online communities did a lot of work to fix these issues.
The IT sphere was growing in geometrical progression, It took Brendan Eich, a Netscape Communications Corporation programmer, only 10 days to develop the scripting language, then known as Mocha. Later it was renamed to Live Script and after that to show that Netscape supported Java within its browser, the name of JavaScript appeared as we know it today. People used to say that it was nothing more than a simple marketing tactic to use the name, popular at that time technology JAVA, in branding completely new programming language JavaScript.
The history of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is very rich and diverse. It would take a great deal of time to describe it in detail. As JavaScript became the most popular and frequently-used programming language, it deserves special attention.
How JavaScript became popular
At the beginning of Web development history, the sites were static, having only basic styles without any dynamics. There were simple documents that contained links to one another.
In the course of time, the need to create various interactions grew and different browser web applications started to appear. The main directions included JavaScript, Java applet, Flash and Silverlight.
At first, browsers used different approaches to building webpages. The solutions like Java applets were popular because they worked independently of the software applications, but at the same time had the drawback – they were insecure and needed additional software. Eventually, JavaScript could provide all the possibilities to implement alternative platforms in development. As a result, while developing in JavaScript, external platforms weren’t used almost at all.
This way JS became a minimal solution for creating dynamic pages. At that time a need in interaction on the client-side of the web page appeared. The part of the business-logic has moved to front-end that enabled creating web apps independently from the server part.