The History of the Web

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Comparing the “Why” of Single Page App Frameworks

Published: January 22, 2019

The web is filled with rundowns of this JavaScript framework versus that one. But we don’t often take the time to understand why they were built in the first place.

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Making a Framework for the Web

Published: May 7, 2018

It started with a simple manifesto. A manifesto posted online with 37 guiding principles, small phrases showcasing big ideas like […]

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That Time MooTools Almost Broke the Web

Published: June 19, 2019

This post was originally published on CSS-Tricks. On March 6, 2018, a new bug was added to the official Mozilla Firefox browser […]

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What Does AJAX Even Stand For?

Published: March 4, 2019

The term AJAX may have not been coined until 2005, but it’s origin stretches all the way back to the early 2000’s, when browsers provided developers with the glue between clients and servers.

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SOAP And REST At Odds

Published: June 26, 2017

Computer programmers like to squabble. I suppose this is true in any profession, but it is most certainly true for […]

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A Look Back at the History of CSS

Published: November 6, 2017

When you think of HTML and CSS, you probably imagine them as a package deal. But for years after Tim […]

Content Management Made Simple

Published: March 16, 2021

Content Management Systems — software that helps people author and publish websites — likely dates back farther than you think. The problem is, it wasn’t quite called that yet.

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The 10-Day Programming Language (Is Kind of a Myth)

Published: October 1, 2019

In 1995, Netscape Navigator was enjoying a meteoric rise to the top of the browser market. They had only released […]

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The History of Rewriting PHP

Published: June 18, 2018

If you work on the web, you know that with software, things don’t always go right the first time. The […]

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The Linguist and the Programmer

Published: February 4, 2020

A history of Perl, Python, and the websites that rely on them.

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Why Do We Call it a Homepage?

Published: December 1, 2020

The word homepage came into popular use in the mid to late 90’s, but it’s origin dates back to the web’s beginning.

The History of the Web is a project by Jay Hoffmann. Get in touch.