A decade in web design
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The web has come a long way in 10 years, and as we approach the end of the year (and indeed the decade) - I feel its time we celebrated the technologies, people and companies that have pushed us forward to where we are today. Lets have a look at where it all started, right up until present day technologies.
2000 - The birth of Ajax
Internet Explorer 5.5 released July 2000, improving its print preview capabilities, CSS and HTML standards support. Prior to 2000 (1999) - with Internet Explorer 5.0 Microsoft released the first version of the XMLHttp ActiveX control giving birth to Asynchronous JavaScript and XML or Ajax as we commonly know it today. This ActiveX control was later implemented across major browser platforms as the XMLHttpRequest object.
Other notable techie events 2000
After the Netscape buyout by AOL in 1999 - Netscape 6, was the first Mozilla-based release in 2000.
Current versions of every key Internet protocol were found to be year 2000-compliant. The internet protocols and standards breathe a huge sigh of relief.
In this year - Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords - the search business model was born.
2001 - IE 6.0 released
IE6 released. *Groan*. Yes this was the year that brought the monster that is Internet Explorer 6.0 to the world. Although widely as one of the worst tech products in the past year, it did bring a few extra CSS properties to IE 5.5 - which was an even bigger curse.
Other notable techie events 2001
YAML (the data serialisation format) was first proposed by Clark Evans.
By 2001 file sharing on the web had become commonplace, and numerous peer-to-peer file-distribution programs such as Napster and Bittorrent became to gain traction.
Programmer Bram Cohen designed the bittorrent protocol in April 2001 and released a first implementation on 2 July 2001.
January 9, 2001 Apple released music software Itunes, in preparation for the the iPod (released October 23rd), revolutionising online music demand. Critics lambasted the $400 price tag, the unconventional scroll wheel and the lack of Windows compatibility, but the availability of online music through a variety of channels (some legal some not) - helped fuel the product’s growth.
Wikipedia launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. By the end of 2001 it had grown in stature to over 20,000 articles. Today - Wikipedia today has around 14 million articles, growing at roughly 1.5 million articles a year or 4109 articles a day. Impressive.
2002 - Mozilla 1.0 released
After a long public beta test, Mozilla 1.0 was released on 5 June 2002. The same code-base, notably the Gecko layout engine, became the basis of independent applications, including Firefox and Thunderbird. Hooray for Gecko!
Other notable techie events 2002
Google sued over patent infringements by Overture on its Patent 6,269,361 with Google agreeing to issue shares of common stock to in exchange for a perpetual license.
Microsoft release first version of ASP.NET (version 1.0)
2003 - Wordpress 1.0 released.
Needing no introduction - Wordpress is now one of the web’s most well recognised blogging (and CMS) platforms, powering over 202 million websites worldwide. This year seen the first release of the platform, appearing in May 2003. Wordpress was a significant fork of the original b2/cafelog blogging platform, taken on as a personal project by Matt Mullenweg. Web standards support and a number of niggles such as permalinks were erradicated in Mullenweg’s fork paving the way for the platform to develop.
Other notable techie events 2003
Microformats were developed in response to the speed that standards bodies took at deciding on what should be within the HTML standard and what shouldn’t. They were developed in partnership with Tantek Çelik, Eric Meyer and Mullenweg, helping to shape semantic markup through the use of attributes.
Safari released in public beta January 2003
Internet Explorer usage peaks at around 95%.
2003 also brought the Golden Shield project to the world (China’s internet firewall) - in November 2003.
2004 - Ruby on Rails released as open source
Created by David Heinemeier Hansson - (commonly referred to as DHH in geek circles) - Ruby on Rails is a web application framework abstracted from Basecamp - a well known project management system.
Other notable users of Rails include Twitter, the Yellow Pages and Github.
Rails gave rise to many new Web 2.0 properties around the web as some of its out of the box features such as scaffolding (takes care of the heavy lifting at the database layer) allowed a much more rapid development path.
Other notable techie events 2004
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” amongst Harvard students which later grew into Facebook.com.
Flickr also created in February 2004 by Ludicorp
2005 - Macromedia acquired by Adobe
Growing primarily through acquisitive means, Macromedia fast became the leading multimedia software house on the web. Macromedia’s flagship product was director - used for CDROM and Kiosk development - Shockwave, a director plugin followed to bring director developers onto the web.
FutureSplash Animator was another acquisition - giving birth to what we know today as Flash. Following Netscape’s lead, Macromedia distributed the plugin free of charge to gain market share.
Dreamweaver was released initially as a code editor, being one of the few products on the market that actually put the control of the markup back in the developers hands. Other alternatives to dreamweaver such as Microsoft Frontpage at the time were critised for bloating code and using proprietory markup and tags.
Fearing Macromedia’s dominance in providing tools that catered to the cloud - rather than desktop publishing (a market that Adobe had pretty much swept clean) - Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2005 for $3.4 billion.
Other notable techie events 2005
Joomla - forked from Mambo on August 17, 2005.
Youtube created Feb 2005.
Flickr acquired March 2005.
Writely released by Upstartle.
CSS2 - returned to working draft June 15, 2005.
CakePHP framework started in 2005 utilising some of the concepts available in Ruby on Rails. Cake uses the MVC pattern extensively.
2006 - Jquery unleashed on the world.
Jquery was developed as a lightweight Javascript library that both simplified Javascript for developers, and shortened the code needed to manipulate the document object model.
John Resig introduced the library at Barcamp New York in January 2006, and it has since went on to become the world’s most popular javascript library used on about a fifth of the top 10,000 websites in the world.
Other notable techie events 2006
Twitter created by Jack Dorsey
Firefox 2.0 released
Internet Explorer 7 - beta released 2006
Upstartle acquired by Google to become Google docs.
The first public version of CodeIgniter released.
Youtube acquired by Google for $1.65 billion
2007 - Microsoft Silverlight released
Following a developer release in late 2006, Microsoft Silverlight was released in the first quarter of 2007. Silverlight provides similar functionality to the technologies found in Adobe Flash, and is distributed as a free browser plugin also. Functionality is coded in a subset of the .NET framework integrating rich interactivity more closely with Microsoft technologies.
Textual content created with Silverlight is indexable by search engines much more easily as components are represented as text (XAML).
Other notable techie events 2007
Version of Safari released for Windows bridging the gap a little for windows developers supporting MacOs users. Safari’s rendering engine differed little between the platforms.
iPhone announced January 2007. Time magazine declares it the invention of the year.
Doubleclick acquired by Google for $3.1 billion
Jerry Yang becomes CEO Yahoo
Facebook open their platform up to developers
2008 - Google Chrome released
Adding to a web developers troubles, Google decides to launch its own web browser - Google Chrome. Thankfully its web standards support meant not too many troubles with supporting it compared to some of its competitors.
Chrome was released as open source in September 2008, including its Javascript engine. Test showed that V8 (the javascript engine) was about twice as fast as Firefox, which gave rise to people pushing the boundaries of what was possible with javascript.
Other notable techie events 2008
Acid 3 test released to measure standard support in browsers.
Obama wins election, propelled by a superior social media campaign across major platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
Cuil.com launches to a fanfare - later flops on performance
2009 - iPhone 3GS released.
The 3GS (the latest iteration of the iphone) offers improved processing power going from 400MhZ to a rumoured 600Mhz processor, elevating it further as the device bring the web to the majority of us. Nielson mobile have further evidence of this here.
Native iPhone applications and web applications have further propelled its adoption.
With the mobile web likely to become an area that web designers and developers have to accomodate in 2010, the iPhone certainly offers the platform that many of us wish to adopt in terms of screen real estate and functionality.
Other notable techie events 2009
Microsoft unveils Bing, a rebranded and improved version of its search offering.
Twitter becomes profitable after licensing Tweets to Bing and Google - both engines integrate real-time search into the SERPS.
Wolfram Alpha - an answer engine released May 2009
Mozilla Labs release Bespin - web editor in the cloud
Google Wave released May 2009 described as “Email on steriods”
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