The Rise of the Internet

Let the Cascade Begin

In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to -- strap yourselves in, here it comes -- control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment: "Sorry, you're screwed."
-- Mark Andressen (Creator of Mosaic)

Sadly, this amazing quote would be quickly undone by another member of CERN. In 1994 HÃ¥kon Wium Lie proposed the idea of CSS. It would be proposed and created by Lie and Bert Bos, who had started his own implementation before deciding to team up with Lie.

It was first introduced into internet explorer 3 on August, 1996. The first official specification was written by Lie and Bos in December of 1996, later that year.

Excellent article on CSS history [1]

Mocha

In 1995 one of, if not the most, infamous languagues was written famously in 10 days: Mocha or Mochascript. Netscape 2.0 was pushing for a general purpose programming language to be built into their web browser and hired Brendan Eich to write it. Mochascript was first shipped as Livescript with the release of Netscape 2.0 in 1996, but was changed later that year to be called Javascript, to make it sound attractive to more developers. Microsoft made a copy called JScript(...Is that the best you have MS?).

Since the web was wide ranging and diverse, it required standardization. The European Computer Manufacturers Association was involved to standardize Javascript. This is where you get the specification of Javascript, known officially as ECMAscript. Here's the first release of ECMAscript [2]

Javascript had the syntax of Java, the prototypal object-orientation of Self, and the functional first class function style of the lisp style languague: Scheme. [3]

The Document Object Model

Having a general purpose programming language for the internet is only useful if you can access the HTML elements on the page. This is where the Document Object Model (DOM) comes in. A very primative DOM was included with Netscape 2.0 and elements on the DOM were accessed by putting Javascript inside "SCRIPT" tags. [4]
Reference for JS in Netscape Navigator Click

Check out the new and improved Ebay, now with JS and CSS