Page 6 - e book 256_Neat
P. 6
Hello JavaScript and CSS
When the World Wide Web first started, web pages were simply text documents.
Nowadays web pages are much more than documents; they now have the ability to be full
blown applications. Part of this ability is due to the additions of JavaScript and CSS. It was
on August 19th 1995 that JavaScript was first announced, originally code named 'Mocha'.
This addition to the World Wide Web was not fully supported by some people, including
Robert Cailliau who had worked with Berners Lee on the WWW project. He described it
as:
The most horrible kluge in the history of computing
This addition to the browser came along with Netscape Navigator 2 and was developed by
Brendan Eich. Despite some people having reservations about it Javascript paved the way
for the web to become less static and be more dynamic and interactive.
Brendan Eich (image courtesy of drewm)
JavaScript made way for websites to think, but it was CSS that introduced the style and
look of the web. Stylesheets have been around in some way shape or form since the early
80's. Cascading style sheets were introduced as a way to create a consistent styling
approach to the web. They allowed the separation of the document content (HTML) and
the styling of it.
CSS1 was introduced in 1995 but had trouble being adopted due to the inconsistencies
amongst browsers of the time. Internet Explorer 5 was released in March 2000 and was the
first browser to support the almost complete CSS1 specification (it covered 99% of it). It
was a year later in 1996 that CSS level one becomes an official recommendation of the
W3C.
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