Web History

In 1993 a student at the University of Illinois named Marc Andreessen created the first Web Browser ("Mosaic") that ran on all three popular operating systems: Unix, Windows, and the Mac. The next year he helped found Netscape and began to develop his second generation browser ("Navigator")

In a real Web form, when the user presses the Submit button the browser transmits data from the boxes and buttons to the Web Server. There is is processed by an application program. In the first generation of the Web, this was the only type of Web programming.

Navigator 2.0 added a simple programming language called "JavaScript" that allowed simple logic to be embedded in the Web page. Unlike other programming languages, JavaScript cannot access files or any other information on the user's computer. It can only manipulate data on the Web page itself. The first version could only access Form fields (and change the file in an image area, or load information into a frame). Now, after the user pressed the Submit button, JavaScript logic could verify that all the required fields have been filled in and the data appears to be reasonable before forwarding information on to the Web Server.

Netscape set its own standards in the first few releases. Then the Web community got together to establish the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C or w3.org). Everyone could bring ideas to the W3C, and standards evolved based on the best submission. While Netscape allowed JavaScript code to control form fields, Microsoft released a version of Internet Explorer in which every element (phrases, paragraphs, tables, headings,...) was a programmable object. JavaScript could change the text in a paragraph, or add a row to a table and fill in the cells. As the program made changes, the rest of the page would reflow text just as if a user made the same changes to a Word document.

When the W3C finally released its standards (HTML 4, CSS, XML, and DOM), it provided the same capability with a slightly different syntax. The programming part of the standards is the Document Object Model (DOM). The W3C now saw that the HTML language of Web pages was a special case of a more general data language called XML. They wanted the DOM programming model to make sense for both HTML and XML, while IE syntax worked only with HTML.

Most of the Web standards are designed for the display of complex text. However, along the way the Web acquired most of the elements of a Graphic User Interface. The user still can't drag elements off the desktop and drop them into a Web page, but the same is true of Java and would be true of any other system independent user interface programming environment.