The creation of the World Wide Web meant the start of a whole new era of communication, advertising, entertainment and much more. Tim Berners-Lee originally created it as a way to make finding data on different computers much easier when working at CERN but quickly realised it’s potential. The system was built on hypertext, links within text. This also allowed for hyperlinks, links to other web resources.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) was the main part of developing the World Wide Web. As the name suggests, the language was used to write hypertext documents, the very thing the World Wide Web is made of. In 1991, the first formal document with a description of HTML was released and 2 years later, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) proposed making HTML a standard, and web developing kicked off.

The first web page went live on August 6th, 1991. The site gives an explanation of HTML, the World Wide Web and more about the technology behind it. The site also asks the reader to put up some code of their own in “How can I help ?”.

You can visit the page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.

Mosaic, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web. Mosaic is often referred to as “the first graphical web browser” since it was the first browser that could display images inline with the text instead of in a separate window. The development of Mosaic started in late 1992 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The browser was released in 1993 but was discontinued 5 years later after losing market sales. Microsoft later on licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer.

Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994. The Yahoo! web page was a directory of other websites hierarchically organized as opposed to a searchable index of pages. The site was originally called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but was changed to the more catchy “Yahoo!” after a few months. Yahoo! laid the very foundation for search engines.

2 years after the release of Mosaic, the lead developers of Mosaic founded the Netscape corporation. They then released a new, more polished browser called “Netscape Navigator”. It quickly became the most popular browser. At this point in time, websites were static which Netscape wanted to change. Netscape hired Brendan Eich to create a new scripting language based on Java. And just like that, JavaScript was born and websites were no longer just static.

Before CSS, the styling was written within the HTML markup. This was generally very repetitive and messy. CSS was proposed by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994 when he was working together with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. CSS pretty much built on transferring the styling from HTML to another document to clear clutter. This also meant that several HTML documents could share the same style for certain elements. Today, HTML, JavaScript and CSS are the 3 cornerstones for web development.

Google saw many flaws in the system used by other search engines. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google theorized about a system that built on relationships among websites. They created an algorithm called “PageRank” that ranked pages based on how many pages that linked to that site. The more links to a page, the higher it was ranked. This meant that popular sites ended up at the top of the search results. The algorithm proved successful and Google rose to the top!

jQuery is a JavaScript library made to simplify JavaScript when it comes to event handling, CSS animations and more. jQuery is by far the biggest JavaScript library and as of May 2019, it is used in 73% of the 10 million most popular websites according to W3Techs. jQuery was created by John Resig after being influenced by earlier JavaScript libraries.

Media queries is a CSS module that allows for different styles to be applied depending on the device’s screen resolution, orientation and more. Håkon Wium Lie, the creator of CSS had included Media Queries as a sketch in his initial proposal for CSS. Media Queries were however not added until CSS3.

HTML5 is the latest version of HTML. This version came with new elements such as header, footer, article, and section, making HTML documents easier to structure and edit.