Comment by middleagedman

13 hours ago

Old guy here. Agreed- the actual story of web development and JavaScript’s use was much different.

HTML was the original standard, not JS. HTML was evolving early on, but the web was much more standard than it was today.

Early-mid 1990s web was awesome. HTML served HTTP, and pages used header tags, text, hr, then some backgound color variation and images. CGI in a cgi-bin dir was used for server-side functionality, often written in Perl or C: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

Back then, if you learned a little HTML, you could serve up audio, animated gifs, and links to files, or Apache could just list files in directories to browse like a fileserver without any search. People might get a friend to let them have access to their server and put content up in it or university, etc. You might be on a server where they had a cgi-bin script or two to email people or save/retrieve from a database, etc. There was also a mailto in addition to href for the a (anchor) tag for hyperlinks so you could just put you email address there.

Then a ton of new things were appearing. PhP on server-side. JavaScript came out but wasn’t used much except for a couple of party tricks. ColdFusion on server-side. Around the same time was VBScript which was nice but just for IE/Windows, but it was big. Perl then PhP were also big on server-side. If you installed Java you could use Applets which were neat little applications on the page. Java Web Server came out serverside and there were JSPs. Java Tomcat came out on server-side. ActionScript came out to basically replace VBScript but do it on serverside with ASPs. VBScript support went away.

During this whole time, JavaScript had just evolved into more party tricks and thing like form validation. It was fun, but it was PhP, ASP, JSP/Struts/etc. serverside in early 2000s, with Rails coming out and ColdFusion going away mostly. Facebook was PhP mid-2000s, and LAMP stack, etc. People breaking up images using tables, CSS coming out with slow adoption. It wasn’t until mid to later 2000s until JavaScript started being used for UI much, and Google’s fostering of it and development of v8 where it was taken more seriously because it was slow before then. And when it finally got big, there was an awful several years where it was framework after framework super-JavaScript ADHD which drove a lot of developers to leave web development, because of the move from server-side to client-side, along with NoSQL DBs, seemingly stupid things were happening like client-side credential storage, ignoring ACID for data, etc.

So- all that to say, it wasn’t until 2007-2011 before JS took off.

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middleagedman

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p0w3n3d  14 minutes ago

I must contradict. 2005-6 was happening my PRADO development, which already was present on market as a framework that was exensively using javascript (mimicking Microsoft's ASP.NET forms) to make AJAX requests and regenerate states of components that were placed on the web page using DOM.

The thing was that it was really hard to write code that did the same DOM + placement on all the browsers, and if a framework could do that, this was becoming great help. I started my webpage development in 2000-ish with if (`document.forms /* is ie */`) ... and was finding a way to run IE on my Linux computer to test the webpage rendering there. And CSS 2 was released on 1998 and could change everything and was the Deus Ex Machine everyone expected, except for it didn't work, especially on IE (which had majority of market, and especially if you developed a business application, you had to count it as the majority of all your clients, if not the only ones). So in CSS 2 you could __allegedly__ do things you really needed, like placing things together or in a related position, instead of calculating browser's sizes etc., but it didn't work correctly, so you had to fallback to javascript `document.getElementById().position = screenWidth/2 etc`.

So according to my memory, (1) these were the dark times mainly because of m$ being lazy and abusing their market position (2) we used javascript to position elements, colorize them, make complicated bevels, borders etc (3) this created gap for Google that they could use to gain power (which we admired at that time as the saviours of the web) (4) Opera was the thing and Resistance icon (boasting themselves of fulfilling all standards and being fast, but they failed a few times too)

also DSL, LAN internet sharing and AOL (in Poland 0202122 ppp/ppp), tshshshshshs, tidutidumtidum, tshshshshshsh ...