2. The first decade of web development
In the beginning of the nineties, Tim Berners-Lee invented the first web browser and created the HyperText Markup Language (HTML),4 a structural language for authoring web documents. At first, HTML was only documented informally—in 1995, an official HTML 2.0 specification5 was released. As the HTML standard was easy to understand and everybody was free to use it, the internet expanded exponentially over a very short period of time. The downside of this wide-scale acceptance however was that HTML started living its own life, the so called “browser wars” and a strong demand for compelling websites being the main catalyzers of this development.
From 1995 on, there were two big players in the browser market: Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Both sides engaged in a fierce battle for conquering the desktop of the internet user. However, the ammunition used had a big impact on the web development landscape; both companies didn't only introduce functional enhancements to their browsers, such as improved security or tweaks in the user interface, but they also made their rendering engines respond to certain proprietary HTML extensions. Examples include Netscape Navigator's <blink>,6 <font>7 and <multicol>8 tags and Internet Explorer's bgsound9 and bgproperties10 attributes as well as its infamous <marquee>11 tag. Browser makers went even further than adding presentational markup possibilities: they also included support for their own scripting languages, allowing developers to add an extra level of interactivity to websites—Netscape included a JavaScript12 engine, while Internet Explorer was shipped with VBScript13 and JScript14 support.
Although explaining all these additions would lead us too far, one of them, which rather exceptionally was supported by early versions of both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, deserves some more attention: the HTML table model.
4 This paper expects some basic familiarity with HTML; readers are supposed to understand the difference between elements, tags, attributes and attribute values. For a short introduction, see http://www.htmldog.com/guides/htmlbeginner/tags/.
5 The HTML 2.0 specification can be found at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_toc.html. Its 2.0 version number distinguishes it from earlier informal documentation.
6 The <blink> tag was a Netscape extension for making text blink.
7 The <font> tag allowed web developers to define the color and size of a page's text. Firstly introduced by Netscape and soon also supported by Internet Explorer, <font> became a part of the HTML 3.2 standard (1997). However, since the creation of HTML 4.01 (1999), the <font> tag is officially deprecated and web developers are encouraged to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) instead (see infra).
8 <multicol> allowed easy creation of multiple-column layouts. Netscape only.
9 bgsound is an Internet Explorer-only attribute and is used for adding a background sound to a webpage.
10 bgproperties is an Internet Explorer addition that allows web developers to prevent a page's background image from scrolling.
11 The <marquee> tag is an Internet Explorer extension for horizontal text scrolls.
12 JavaScript is a scripting language created by Netscape, that can be used to create dynamic web applications. It was later on standardized as ECMAScript. See also infra.
13 VBScript stands for Visual Basic Scripting Edition. It is a scripting language created by Microsoft and only works in its Internet Explorer browser.