
A Brief History of Web Design for Designers - sandijs
http://blog.froont.com/brief-history-of-web-design-for-designers/
======
sosuke
Neat start, but so many holes! JavaScript didn't take off for years, jQuery
didn't come about 2006, and arguably the real start of the JavaScript
"renaissance" was Prototype in 2005. CSS grid layouts got their start in
around 2004, trying to finally replace tables for presentation. The larger CSS
frameworks started in 2006 or so. Flash didn't even really take off until the
Flash MX 2004 with the release of ActionScript 2. Even then ActionScript 1
didn't come out until 2000 with Flash 5 and Flash 4 before that had very
little functionality with support for Actions, but people started using them
right away in 1999.

Well, I guess my take isn't a brief history, but there is so much fun to learn
in there on how we got to where we are!

~~~
thomasfl
Yes, the history of web development is easily forgotten. JavaScript was
basically considered pretty useless by many web developers before Prototype
and jQuery came and provided a compatibility layer that fixed browser
differences. It was not worth the effort to add javascript to your html
because no one had any confidence that it would work in all types of browsers.
It's less than 10 years ago.

~~~
Spearchucker
In South Africa JavaScript took off like crazy in the late 90's. Netscape was
still big then. Here's a thing I built in 1997 - it was a side project I used
to teach myself JavaScript -

[http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/mobile/](http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/mobile/)

Choose "Handsets" from the top menu, and play around with manufacturers and
network types to narrow the list of cellphones

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AKluge
Well, the first web access in 1990 was graphical.
[http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2...](http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif)
Extracted from Tim Berners-Lee's (inventer the WWW) comments
[http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/WorldWideWeb.html](http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-
Lee/WorldWideWeb.html).

The history is far deeper and richer than captured here.

------
jasode
I always enjoy recaps of tech timelines. Thanks for putting that together.

My wishlist of more web timelines with additional/different focus would
include:

20 years of web advertising and tracking: this would outline the nuclear arms
race between web authors and web browsers' user protections and google ranking
algorithms. Stuff like cookies, the invisible 1 pixel image pingback, seo
keyword spamming, etc

20 years of web technology failures: Java applets, XHTML, semantic web, etc.
It's instructive to use hindsight to explain why some technologies/ideas don't
get adopted.

~~~
BrandonMarc
Open question: would VRML count as a failure?

~~~
Moru
The deep silence says Y E S...

------
Animats
The amusing thing about web design trends is the dislike of tables, followed
by the creation of CSS and JavaScript hacks to create columnar web design.
Tables are now back, but they're called "layout tables".

What's been lost are the good page layout tools that didn't require manually
writing HTML and CSS. Macromedia Dreamweaver once allowed laying out a page
without even looking at HTML source. Now, you can't even buy Dreamweaver; it's
rental-only.

~~~
sosuke
Please point me to something about "layout tables" because I haven't hear of
or seen a resurgence of <table/> layouts.

~~~
notahacker
I'm not sure many people refer to "layout tables", but a significant
proportion of the online "grid systems" and "frameworks" are dedicated to
essentially producing the same functionality as <CENTER><TABLE><TR><TD
COLSPAN="2" VALIGN="centre"> etc. in a more verbose, less reliable manner,
using HTML classes, CSS and the odd JS hack.

~~~
Animats
That's what gets me. The div/float/clear approach, which is one-dimensional,
is a poor match to "modern grid layouts". Elaborate CSS gimmicks are needed to
fake it. Here are four of them: [http://www.sitepoint.com/easy-responsive-css-
grid-layouts/](http://www.sitepoint.com/easy-responsive-css-grid-layouts/) One
just uses tables.

Now we have "grid" as a primitive in CSS. Inevitably, it needs a special case
for some versions of Internet Explorer. There's "grid", and there's "-ms-
grid". Here's the W3C spec.

[http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/](http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/)

It's a lot like tables, but it uses different terminology and has some extra
bells and whistles, so that makes it OK.

------
vital
You missed Web 2.0, around 2004, the rise of AJAX.

~~~
sandijs
True. I also left out Frames. Web 2.0 for me was too much about aesthetics,
but AJAX is very close to JS. Both deserve a spot in an extended version of
the history though!

~~~
k__
It's about design.

The post also states that Flash was "freedom", which it was only in a design
sens.

~~~
sosuke
It was a freedom in programming too, JavaScript was/is still buggy from
browser to browser and with Flash using ActionScript you could code once and
run confidently in any browser with the plugin.

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jimktrains2
"The dark ages of web design (1989)"

The Golden Age of Accessibility maybe :-\

~~~
sandijs
Except not that many of us had means to access that information. I totally
agree with this though:
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

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lwgdhn
From 1989 to 2014 encompasses 25 years of progression. If you think about any
other 25 year segment in history, I doubt you would have found such changes in
print/media than there has been in the last 25 years. Consider that it took 25
years just for the printing press to move from Germany to England[1].

Imagine if it took 25 years for any technology trend today to go from the US
to any other developed country in the world.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press)

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thomasfl
I would like to see an article that goes depper into the bright future of web
design. The future no doubt is bouncy and full of smooth animated transitions.
It makes web apps easier to use and gives people what they have been used to
from their smartphone apps.

Google's Polymer, react and the famo.us javascript libraries seems to be only
the beginning of a string of new libraries that pushes html rendering
optimisation to new levels and makes it easier to do tweening and handle user
events.

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angersock
I like how in the "what's next" section, we _still_ don't have vertical
centering.

Thanks CSS!

~~~
Loque
flex box is on its way =D (I hope, lol)

~~~
NathanCH
It's so close to being suitable for production!

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themoonbus
I was hoping for a little trip down memory lane in terms of aesthetics. All of
the gifs are beautiful, but look like they are from 2014!

A really nice overview otherwise.

