The History of Web Design
The history of web design dates back to a fuzzy date but one can safely call Tim Berners Lee the father of the World Wide Web because he is the one who hosted the first website in August 1991. He was interested in the ability to link academic papers electronically and utilize the Internet to communicate with people in other laboratories around the world.Although nowadays the markup (HTML, XHTML, DHTML) is quite complex, in the beginning you could just create paragraphs, headings and hyperlinks and in fact hyperlinking was the main characteristic of web pages. There was nothing much you could do in the name of web designing.

The History of Web Design and the History of Browsers Go Together

Since the beginning we have needed some sort of "browsers" to browse the websites. The browsers understood the markup and rendered the pages on the computer screen accordingly.

As the browsers advanced, so did the web design functions. The markup became more complex and flexible giving the designers abilities to create forms, present tabular data using tables and insert images. The tables that initially were supposed to represent data soon began to be used for the layout purposes and they are still being used that way although DIV-based layouts are recommended for better adaptability.The static pages started responding to user inputs when Netscape -- a major browser at that time -- introduced Livescript that could run on web pages with needing a compiler or without requiring a plugin. Since Java was quite well known at that time, Livescript was re-christened as JavaScript.

Another mainstream browser, the Internet Explorer, introduced VBScript at around the same time, having a syntax similar to Visual Basic.Macromedia Flash was introduced in about 1996 and this made web designing interactive and animated.The introduction of CSS was a stepping stone in the history of web design that practically revolutionized the way designers created web design. It let them separate design and date. Whether a website had 5 pages or 5,000 pages, a single change in the CSS code could change the design across the pages.Ironically, the browsers -- software that renders the web pages -- have been the greatest hurdle in the history of web design. For instance, the Internet Explorer became the most hated browser amidst the designer community because it usually destroyed the well-designed CSS layouts because it doesn't understand some of the advanced definitions of CSS. Ironically, again, it is the most widely used browser in the world because it ships free with the Windows operating system.

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