Matt Prokes

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The Professional Developer Series
Volume 2, Web Development
Chapter 1.2 History Of Web Development
Page: #8

So one thing that applets did well was provide a container to build web applications, the issue with this is those same web applications could never leave the boundary of that container. The second issue is that applets were compiled, which made interfaces difficult to debug. The third issue is that java was never intended to be the language of the internet, but instead an application of the internet (similar to navigator its self). At the end of the day this ended up being the nail in the coffin for applets, since they required users download a plug-in in order to use them. Although java applets are still around today, they are at constant battle with competing technologies such as flash and silverlight. Flash by far being the most popular of the three running on nearly 95% of web browsers (though the versions of that 95% are not all up-to-date).

Javascript on the other hand took a bit longer to come into the forefront, it also took some other technologies to help it along in becoming the language that it is today (CSS, XML, XSLT, XPATH, SVG, VML). The first milestone for javascript was its acceptance as a web standard by 1997, though by that time there were already dialects of the original Netscape javascript, specifically JScript. Though again the standard of 1997 was hardly a powerful language.

In 1998 Microsoft shipped Internet Explorer 5.0 (which by that time overtook Netscape) it supported dom level 1. Dom, or the Document Object Model allows you to modify markup dynamically. Dom level 0 was very limited in that you could only modify things like image tags and form elements, later versions of dom (specifically versions 1+) allows modification of any markup element available on the page, as well as xml. This feature alone basically replaced much (but not all) of the need for applets, and did not require any specialized plug-ins.

Here is where things get interesting; with the release of any new technology (especially for the internet), it usually takes a few years for adoption. So Dom Level 1 may have been released in late 1998, it does not mean though that it was completely adopted by the internet until around 2000, 2001. For javascript specifically the adoption rate was a bit slower due to a market that at the time was dominated by applets and the emerging flash technologies. It wasn’t until a little company known as google (circa 2004) started to base their entire delivery platform around javascript; that javascript won back much of the respect which it had lost.

Tags: web developer 1.2

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