Dot-com
Internet history during the dot-com era, from the 1990s through to the first few years of the 2000s.
Note: some of these articles were migrated from my previous website, Web Development History (WDH), which was active during 2021. Check the timeline for a chronological list of WDH posts.
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1996: Flash and CSS Bring Design to the Web
There were two stylistically opposed approaches to web design in the 1990s, epitomized by two distinct — and utterly different — technologies, both of which debuted in 1996.
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1995: MySQL Debuts and Web Databases Slowly Emerge
By the end of 1995, the foundational pieces of the open source LAMP stack for web development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) were in place. However, MySQL was not initially open source.
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1995: Apache and Microsoft IIS Shake Up Web Server Market
The Apache Web Server Project announced a new 'public-domain HTTP server' in April 1995. That was followed soon after by Microsoft's first web server software, Internet Information Server.
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1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo
The founding of Yahoo is one of the iconic Silicon Valley business stories. What’s lesser known is the web development story of Yahoo throughout 1994, based on a scripting language called Perl.
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1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP
1998 was the year the web started to open up. It was when open source projects like Mozilla and open standards like DOM began to steer the web towards a more open, equitable future.
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1997: The Year of DHTML
DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, was essentially a combination of HTML, JavaScript, the newly released CSS standard, and an emerging web programming model called the DOM (Document Object Model).
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1997: JavaScript Grows Up and Developers Push the Boundaries
Pointy-headed technical analysis of JavaScript was not what was required in 1997. Developers of that era needed practical guidance and code samples.
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1995: PHP Launches As Server-Side CGI Scripts Toolset
In mid-1995, a toolset called Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) was launched — and hardly anyone noticed. PHP wasn’t a scripting language at this point, but it would eventually become one.
