[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/

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