Timeline
Wikipedia
A free, user contributed encyclopedia, Wikipedia is launched as an offshoot of its predecessor, Nupedia. Unlike Nupedia, which demanded strict editorial guidelines for any article, Wikipedia allowed anybody to contribute or edit content, quickly amassing a large pool of crowd-sourced entries and becoming the de-facto source for information on the web.
Wikipedia: The Story of Collective Knowledge
Boing Boing
Boing Boing gets its first website, originally as an online extension of a print zine of the same name by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair. Over the years, Boing Boing will evolve into one of the first link blogs with a fairly steady inner group of editors that share content from across the internet mixed in with their own commentary.
Dreaming Big on the Open Web
Browser Upgrade Campaign
WaSP launches the Browser Upgrade Campaign, aimed at helping web users understand the importance of standards. It starts when developers begin adding banners to their site to signal to users it’s time for an upgrade. Some even redirect users with very old browsers to a new page altogether, explaining why it’s time for an upgrade.
b2
Developer Michel Valdrighi releases a hacked together alternative to other blogging platforms, like Greymatter or Movable Type. He uses PHP and MySQL to create the platform, and makes it open source so others can contribute. After Valdrighi leaves the project, b2 is forked as WordPress.
HTML Components
Upon its release, Internet Explorer 5.5 includes support for HTML components, which allows developers to attach new behaviors to existing HTML elements, and even create new elements using a combination of JavaScript, HTML, and a specialized version of XML.
Web Components Before Web Components
WAVE
WAVE is released by the late Dr. Len Kasday, working out of Temple University. It is similar to many other accessibility tools that come before it, except for one crucial feature: it’s release as a browser extension. The project was taken over by WebAIM in 2003 and is still in active development.
Internet Explorer 6
Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 6 bundled with Windows XP. The browser is fairly advance, features the latest web standards, and takes a large share of the market. However, the next version of IE would not be released for 5 years, and it soon fell behind its competitors.
BlackPlanet
Omar Wasow launches BlackPlanet in partnership with Benjamin Sun, CEO of Community Connect and founder of AsianAve. Though not, strictly speaking, the first social media site on the web, it is the most popular of early iterations, and its passionate community would mold the site into a template for many of the social networks that came after.
Finding Our Digital Identities: A History of Social Media
YTMND
After watching Finding Forrester, Max Goldberg becomes obsessed with the line “You’re the man now, dog!”, and creates a single serving site dedicated to it. Later, Goldberg shortens the title to YTMND and allows other users to host their own single serving websites with simple tools.
Moveable Type
Mena and Ben Trott launch Moveable Type, a tool that allows users to easily set up their own blog. The software puts an emphasis on customization, and even early on lets users add metadata and change their website’s style, drawing a whole new group of users to the blogging community.
The Evolution of Blogging
The Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine launches as the web archiving piece of the Internet Archive that allows users to view, browse and search through timestamped versions of websites by date. Each snapshot of the Internet Archive is available through the Wayback Machine, which crawls the web for new data 24/7.
Archiving the Web
Camino
Ported from the in-progress Firefox browser and ported to the Mac, several Netscape employees release Chimera, later renamed to Camino. Camino is the first Mac browser built using the lightning fast Cocoa API, and represents a step towards native mac browsing that would later be replicated in Safari. It was discontinued in 2012.
Last.fm
Last.fm merged two projects, a personalized web radio and a music listening history tracker known as Audioscrobbler, into a single site. It offered ways for users to connect via music preferences, and to discover new music through a radio informed by the tastes of one’s digital friends. In 2007, it would be acquired by CBS and remove many of its streaming features.
Doctype Switching and the Box Model Hack
While developing IE5 for Mac, Tantek Çelik introduces doctype switching, allowing web developers to define which CSS box model to use in modern browsers. To polyfill older browsers, he creates the Box Model Hack, which uses some CSS to define widths for both box models in the same definition.
Friendster
Named as a combination of “Napster” and “friend” by creator Jonathan Abrams, Friendster launches as one of the earliest social networks with broad and general appeal. It’s initial intent is to help people connect their offline friends to their online ones, but it quickly gathered millions of members before eventually being subsumed by larger rival MySpace.
Meetup.com
Meetup launches with a small, five-person team as a site that sets up spontaneous meetings voted on by a group of people with similar interests. It will soon gain steam during the primary campaign of Howard Dean, when it is used as a political organizing tool around the country, bringing over a hundred thousand people to the site. In 2017, it would be acquired by WeWork.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon unveils a set of tools for developers, including an XML API, and calls it Amazon Web Services. At first, these tools allow developers to pull data from Amazon to use on their own site, but it will slowly evolve to become a complete solution for cloud infrastructure and hosting on the web.
Semantic Wired Redesign
Developers and designers at Wired magazine launch a brand new version of their website with a standards based layout using semantic HTML and CSS. At a time when standards were inconsistent, Wired established an impressive precedent for other web designers to follow.
Wired and ESPN Redesign
Wired and ESPN launch standards-based redesigns just a few months apart, building on the work being down at the Web Standards Project and providing a strong, at-scale example of using CSS for advanced web page layout.
RSS 2.0
After several years of in-fighting by members of the web community, Dave Winer releases a second version of RSS which adds some minor improvements to the format. After it is released, the New York Times and other publishers syndicate their content with RSS, but backlash from the community leads to the creation of Atom.
Mozilla Phoenix
After years as an experimental branch of Netscape Navigator, Phoenix is unveiled to the Mozilla open source community. Phoenix was a complete rewrite of the existing browser, and was faster, lighter and included the latest web standards.
JSON
Douglas Crockford launches JSON.org, which describes the data interchange format he and Chip Morningstar had created a year prior. JSON is a originally a simple way to communicate data from the server back to the browser, but after the rise of AJAX, it will becomes a critical alternative to XML.
AJAX without the X: The History of JSON
Safari
Apple releases its second ever browser attempt. It would allow Macs to ship with a native browser, and end their relationship with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It uses a little known open source browser engine known as KHTML, which will eventually transform into Webkit.
Cynthia Says
HiSoftware releases the tool Cynthia Says, named for accessibility expert and pioneer Cynthia Waddell. The Cynthia Says webpage allows for developers to enter in a webpage and get a full report about the accessibility of their site. Each report offered educational resources about the issue, as well as a list of potential solutions.
An Early History of Web Accessibility
WordPress
Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little create a fork of the popular blogging platform known as b2, creating the foundation of software that would eventually become WordPress. WordPress would continue to grow and eventually become a full content management system that can be installed on a users server complete with an administration panel, themes and installable plugins.
15 Years of WordPress
A group of tech entrepreneurs, including several Paypal alumni, launch the first version of professional development focused social network LinkedIn. Unlike other social media platforms, the site targets an older, business-focused demographic looking to increase their professional network. It is almost immediately backed by a surge of venture capital.
CSS Zen Garden
Dave Shea launches CSS Zen Garden. The garden is a collection of user contributed webpages, all with the same HTML, but each with a different CSS stylesheet. The examples on Shea’s site help push the web standards movement forward, and convinces many of the strength of CSS.
The Rise of CSS
Designing with Web Standards
New Riders Press publishes Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, a handbook that helps designers transition from table-based hacks to HTML and CSS based designs. It offers a pragmatic approach for getting started with web standards and acts as a jumping off point for a lot of web designers.
Year of A List Apart
Atom Syndication Format
After RSS went unchanged for several years, some members of the web community decided to create a new syndication format that was better suited to the growing needs of the web. Atom is released after a few months of discussion on a public wiki, and the format eventually becomes and IETF standard.
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Organization is spun off into a non-profit called the Mozilla Foundation. The group had been operating from within Netscape for some time, but making the organization independent ensured it could continue to operate even if Netscape didn’t.
Myspace
A team at eUniverse unveils Myspace, a social network modeled after Friendster, but with loftier goals in mind. Rather than limit users to connections from real life, Myspace opened the door for a new generation of users to find and connect with digital friends through new digital identities. Myspace would eventually become the most popular site on the web, sell to News Corp for 580 million dollars, before eventually shutting down.
Delicious
Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov launch Delicious, a social bookmarking platform. Delicious is notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the introduction of tags, easily searchable keywords attached by the user to every bookmark. In 2005, they would be acquired by Yahoo and eventually change hands a few more times.
Sliding Doors of CSS
Douglas Bowman writes about a new CSS technique that takes advantage of layered background images to create flexible and continuous image-based backgrounds. Bowman uses tabbed navigation for his example, but the technique quickly becomes the basis for unique web designs.
Orkut
Orkut Büyükkökten launches his social networking platform, Orkut, a project he had developed independently during his time working for Google. It rose to popularity primarily through its devoted users in Brazil and India. It’s features were not unlike those in Friendster or Myspace, but allowed users to organize themselves into a number of so-called “communities.” It was closed in 2014.
Basecamp
Originally conceived as an internal tool to help manage clients, 37signals launches Basecamp, a platform that helps agencies store contacts, track leads, and gather feedback. It is impressively advanced, built using Ruby on Rails, and takes off soon after its release.
Flickr
Originally a small feature of the massively multiplayer Game Neverending, Flickr is unveiled to the public by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. The site allows users to share photos with one another, and like, share, and comment on one another’s photos.
What Happens When Yahoo Acquires You
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla releases it’s new browser, Firefox, after working on its development for almost four years. An open source project, Firefox introduces the latest web standards, and includes the new Gecko layout engine. It represented one of the first major browser advancements in quite some time.
The Many Faces (And Names) of Mozilla
CSS Sprites
Dave Shea writes an article for A List Apart outlining a technique, adapted from 2D game design, for organizing background images in a single file, and then using the CSS background-position
property to retrieve them. This makes web pages more performant and easier to manage.
Gmail
Gmail is launched to private invites after three years of development. Initially created by Paul Bucheit as an almost skunkworks project, Gmail offered more storage and better search than its competitors, all built around an application-like experience. The April Fools day joke is Sergey Brin’s idea.
W3C Web Applications Workshop
Adobe convenes W3C’s Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents to discuss the future of web applications. The group votes against extending HTML in favor of the much stricter standard XHTML. After the meeting, frustrated dissenters will create the WHATWG.
Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) Founded
Representatives from Mozilla and Opera, led by Ian Hickson, form the WHATWG as a response to the direction of the W3C. The new standards body begins with a mailing list and simple charter to discuss how to improve the HTML markup language.
A Tale of Two Standards
Resolution Dependent Layout
Cameron Adams publishes a new technique on his blog which uses Javascript to detect the resolution of a site visitor’s monitor, and swap out different stylesheets based on the result. This allows designers to change the layout of their site based on resolution, and foreshadows the techniques of responsive web design.
Digg
Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson create Digg, a link sharing site that lets users share articles from the Internet which other users can either “digg” or “bury”. The site is a bit of a Silicon Valley darling and quickly secures a strong following and funding, only to fade away years later, in 2012.
Vimeo
Two CollegeHumor employees launch the Vimeo video streaming site as a way of sharing and tagging videos from the site. Though launched at the same time as YouTube, Vimeo’s focus is on curated content and high definition videos. It was acquired by IAC at the same time as CollegeHumor.
First Viral Video
Gary Brolsma publishes “Numa Numa,” which would soon become the web’s first viral video, on Newgrounds. The video features a small clip of Brolsma dancing along to “Dragostea Din Tei” on his webcam, but it’s low-quality authenticity is enough to make it spread out far across the web.
Google Maps
Google Maps leaks out to the Slashdot community a day early, while still in beta. The application renders maps tile by tile, allowing users to scrub through or zoom out using a mouse. In its first release, only North America was represented, a major complaint from the community.
YouTube
Former Paypal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim launch their video sharing platform YouTube. Though it’s capabilities are somewhat limited, eventually YouTube would become the most popular video sharing site on the web. Even early on, it makes videos easy to upload, and includes a cross-platform video player.
Ajax
What Does AJAX Even Stand For?
Prototype
Sam Stephenson writes the first version of Prototype, one of the earliest examples of a Javascript framework. Prototype was built with the goal of both bringing object-oriented programming to the Javascript language, and extending Javascript functionality to add features that it lacked.
Webkit
Apple open sources their browser engine, which consists of two main components, the WebCore rendering engine and the JavaScriptCore JavaScript engine. Though used only by Apple at the time, Webkit would soon become the most popular browser engine thanks to its adoption by Google and use on mobile devices.
The Browser Engine That Could
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian create Reddit as part of the inaugural batch at Y Combinator. It’s goal was to become the “front page of the Internet,” a goal that it has come close to reaching over the years, with features like post karma and subreddits.
Reddit v. Digg: A Difference in Approach
Microsoft Web Standards Task Force
Spearheaded by Molly Holzschlag, The Web Standards Projects creates a task force to help bring better web standards support to Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Over the next few years, this group would provide Microsoft with guidance on how best to implement the latest HTML and CSS specifications.
Opera Mini
Launched as a beta project in conjunction with the Norweigian television station TV 2, Opera Mini could be downloaded to any phone and give that phone instant access to the web. Opera Mini makes use of a proxy server, downloading, optimizing and caching requested web pages before they sent are sent back to users, saving on bandwidth and increasing speed and reliability.
A Mini Browser for the Masses
Million Dollar Homepage
Launched by Alex Tew, the Million Dollar Homepage lays out a grid of a million pixels, and sells each to advertisers for a dollar. The site is an early example of an Internet phenomenon that spreads quickly to millions of users.
The Power of the Pixel
Dojo Toolkit
What began as a project among developers at Informatica is released as an open source JavaScript framework. In order to house the code and intellectual property rights, a non-profit known as Dojo Foundation is formed. Over the years, Dojo would expand to include utilities and tools for building dynamic web applications that are consistent across browsers.
Pandora Radio
Pandora Radio launches to the public after a beta period. It is built on top of the Music Genome project created by Tim Westgreen, Jon Kraft, and Will Glaster. The project mapped music according to an algorithm developed by Westgreen that divided music into dozens of categories and linked them together. The radio used that algorithm to create a personalized radio that would eventually reach hundreds of millions of users.
Club Penguin
After several iterations and a brief beta period, Club Penguin is released to the general public. Its three founders used it to create something they always wanted for their own kids: a safe place for kids to have fun and interact online. In 2007, it would be sold to Disney, who owns the brand to this day (though the site has been taken offline).
We Made These Sites for Kids?
Ruby on Rails
David Heinemeier Hansson creates Ruby on Rails, a Ruby framework that includes tools to quickly develop web applications. The framework is an outgrowth of Hansson’s work on the Basecamp product, and it is released alongside a 15 minute demo video and thorough documentation, helping to bolster its success.
Making a Framework for the Web
Yet Another Multicolumn Layout
Dirk Jesse releases his grid framework, often referred to as YAML for short. The tool allows developers to build cross-browser web layouts quickly and effectively, without requiring duplicate or boilerplate code.
Firebug
Joe Hewitt, one of the creators of Firefox, releases an early version of his debugging tool, the first of its kind meant for monitoring HTML, CSS and JavaScript right in the browser. Hewitt decides early on to open source his project. As a result, the project is led by several different people over the years, along with a steady stream of contributors, before it is discontinued in 2017
Checking “Under the Hood” of Code
jQuery
jQuery is unveiled by John Resig at BarCamp NYC, an informal web developer meetup. Dubbed with the tagline “New Wave Javascript,” jQuery’s major departure from other Javascript libraries is its introduction of a new API layered on top of existing Javascript methods which added to but did not extend the core Javascript language.
Web Inspector
Timothy Hatcher officially checks in a new feature, known as Web Inspector, into the Webkit rendering engine project. It is the result of a over a year of work, and provides tools for developers to easily inspect their HTML and CSS code, as well as debug JavaScript. It also comes with an “Inspect Element” feature, which lets developers quickly jump to a highlighted section on their webpage.
YUI Library
Yahoo! publishes their open source User Interface Library, a set of tools and utilities for building dynamic applications, used internally by the Yahoo! development team. Over the years, it would become a standard for framework and component-based development, and form the basis of an expansive programming community.
From designing interfaces to designing systems
The 9
Yahoo! launches a daily video series with a list of the nine best websites or web videos for the day. It is hosted by Maria Sansone. The show runs five days a week for several years before it is eventually cancelled by Yahoo!
Bringing the Laughter, Week after Week
MooTools
A later addition to the Javascript lineup, MooTools is initially released as a lightweight version of Prototype. It soon evolves into a framework in its own right and, at its peak, counts itself among the most popular. It builds on the object-oriented principles of Prototype and, like its predecessor, extends existing Javascript primitives to build out not yet released features.
That Time MooTools Almost Broke the Web
100 Million Websites
The web reaches 100 million total websites, a number that would continue to grow exponentially over the next decade.
The Unlikely Pioneers of the Early Web
Learn your history