The Internet is one of the greatest inventions of all time. It has made our lives far easier and we are completely dependent on this asset to do even the smallest of our day-to-day activities. From shopping to making travel arrangements, entertaining ourselves, and more, the internet has a solution to everything.
What makes all of this possible? The web applications of course! Web applications allow us to interact with the internet and use all the services that we need.
Today, web applications not only have a beautiful user interface but also work efficiently with the latest technologies and get things done in seconds. However, initially web applications were very basic and had only a few design elements to work with.
Web development has come a long way since its inception and is now a huge field of study. Let’s see how web development has evolved over time!
The 1990s
HTML came into existence in the early 1990s as web developers realized the need for visually pleasing and understandable web pages that are easy to interact with. HTML still sits at the core of every web development.
The introduction of HTML allowed interconnection between web pages, well-structured page layouts, integration of images and animations in web pages.
Microsoft introduced AJAX technology in the year 1999 which used JavaScript to send data asynchronously.
The 2000s
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) came into being in the early 2000s. This allowed developers to create web pages with better visual elements like animations, graphics and more. Now, web pages could be personalized and made different from each other.
jQuery came into existence in 2006 and was invented by John Resig to upgrade the responsiveness of web pages.
After Apple launched the first generation of iPhones in 2007, web development expanded to the mobile platform as well. Now web developers had to develop websites that were responsive on mobile phones as well. Mobile web development got a new market as Apple released App Store in 2008.
The 2010s
The Backbone JS framework, which was the first JavaScript framework, was introduced in 2010. This framework became very popular among developers and thus JavaScript programming gained more popularity.
The 2010s was the era of smartphones. Web development became more focused on enhancing security features and user-friendliness and reducing load time.
In 2014, HTML5 and CSS3 were introduced which enabled developers to create better web pages with enhanced performance.
Today, there exist multiple web development frameworks like AngularJS, Ruby on Rails, Django, etc. and programming languages like Python, Ruby, Java, etc. along with data formats like JSON and XML. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT and more such technologies are used in web development.
Conclusion
All these web development technologies allow us to develop creative, beautiful and highly efficient websites which look and work very differently from the web pages developed back when the internet was introduced.
Web development technologies keep advancing to meet the ever-changing needs of the users and to work well with all the technological signs of progress. Thus, we can expect web development to keep evolving and innovating in the future as well.