Brief Retrospective on the Genesis of Websites

Since the beginnings of the digital age, various paths have been taken to generate digital content. From the early days, $\TeX$ and $\LaTeX$ can be mentioned, pure formatting languages designed to produce printable and well-formatted text.

Things quickly became more abstract. HTML was first developed for static web pages. This, in turn, evolved from a much more complex and general standard, SGML, which is no longer relevant today.

With XML¹, for the first time a simpler, yet abstract and very powerful markup language was developed, capable of structuring text as well as data for further processing. XML was once considered the holy grail, but it was not. Things evolved quickly from there.

As the first interactive websites emerged, JavaScript became an important programming language for websites. JavaScript had to be standardized quickly, especially its access to the DOM².

In addition, standards like JSP and JSF appeared, with which websites could be preprocessed on servers. Such standards are long outdated. Nowadays, the layout for websites is mostly generated in web browsers, i.e., on the computers of internet users.

The enumeration of past technological approaches could continue for a long time and would lead from one thing to another. The reader would drown in a sea, that has long been swum through.

Endless attempts were made. Thus, looking back into the past is like looking into apparent chaos. Out of this chaos, the (still very complex) Status Quo as we know it today slowly formed. -- However, even this is still constantly changing, becoming more powerful, and expanding.

Remarkably, the old does not completely disappear. A core has formed that remains and is very durable. HTML as the formal skeleton for websites, for example, has remained. JavaScript has also stayed and is still the most commonly used programming language for websites, widely used and indispensable. This despite the fact that better and more powerful programming languages have long been developed.

This post is written in MDX³, and thus based on one of the most advanced standards for creating internet pages available to us today. It goes far beyond what we could all imagine twenty years ago.