What is a website? How does it spread around the world? What is the difference between a website and CMS platforms?
Like every other new technology introduced to our everyday life and work, we often have some questions that we want to ask. This could be different, based on our knowledge and usage of the Internet, but today we are going to start from the basics and build it up to give you a thorough understanding about the amazing world of the Web.
Who created the World Wide Web?
It was only 1946 when a science fiction writer, Murray Leinster, described a world where everyone has a device in their house that provides whatever kind of information they want.
Several decades later, Tim Berners Lee made that vision a reality in 1989, while working at CERN; He achieved to create and standardize all the essential technologies of the Web like web servers, HTML and HTTP.
What did the first website look like?
The first websites where plain text documents with links to other documents. This may look simplistic, but imagine that prior to that you had to manually look and open any related documents. The first field of application was the scientific papers, where you could link to the references of your study, revolutionizing the research process. On August 6, 1991, the world was changed, when the first web page was published. There is a copy of the original page on the official site of the W3 Organization, if you are interested to see how all this started.
How we got the website we see today?
As mentioned, the first web pages were just text documents. Nowadays, there are beautiful, artistic websites and web applications, capable of completing any required task. The missing link between static documents and today’s interactive websites was the introduction of CSS and JavaScript.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the language that browsers understand in order to change the appearance of the documents; that enables the web developer to change colors, positions and more, leading to stunning results.
But still the website remained static; more beautiful, but without any functionality worth of note. The final piece was the introduction of JavaScript (JS). Now we can insert logic to our site and make it responsive to our actions. Today, JavaScript enables the creation of web apps, applications that run entirely on the browser, without any need of installation.
Recap
From that point onwards, we have been equipped with the basic tools to bring about a technological revolution; we created a format for designing web pages with style and functionality, we have a way to store them and distribute them anywhere in the world.
That was the first steps in the history of the Web. In the next part, we will see how the World Wide Web spread around the world and what changes it brought.