Websites have evolved over the past couple of years. They went from being 4simple pages of html text to hard to navigate websites to simplistic websites. Today, the websites you visit will likely be of a minimalistic nature, with images that cover the whole page and fonts that are lightweight and futuristic. The design of websites has gone a long way since the hypertext transfer protocol was first invented.
Before the widespread use of the internet and web browser, scientists used the internet to communicate with other scientists. At this time web sites were mostly text-based and had little to no images. There were very few web browsers at that time. among those were mostly text-based and had very little features. Believe it or not, the actual method to transfer data from computer to computer over long distances was actually made in the late 1960s. According to History. com “The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network. The technology continued to grow in the 1970s after scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, a communications model that set standards for how data could be transmitted between multiple networks. ARPANET adopted TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, and from there researchers began to assemble the “network of networks that became the modern Internet” (History. com). TCP/IP was the first baby step towards the development of the modern internet. Before html there was only limited communication between computers and the internet was still not a practical idea.
The most recognizable way we could access the internet was invented in 1990. The world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee who created a platform where there was actually practical for people to view documents from computers that were far away. This would be considered as the dawn of the internet. During this time most websites were text only. Internet connections were established using dial-up internet so webpages had to be small in size.
As websites continued to grow things started to get a little more complicated. At this time computers were starting to become more affordable, thus there were more people using them. Now, a table based website design took over. Now, there were ways to organize information. Website design finally started to become a thing. Firms specializing in table based website design started to pop up. At that time websites were still primarily text based but now had ways to organize information in the best way possible.
In the late 1990s flash was developed. It changed the standard for how websites should be. According to evolutionoftheweb.com flash is “a multimedia platform used to add animation,video, and interactivity to web pages.”(.evolutionoftheweb.com). When flash was introduced into websites they became more visitor based.While many of the same design elements of the previous period were still present, these were enhanced with new features such as color-changing navigations, tiled background images, neon colors, 3D buttons, and more. Another thing that changed the standard for websites was javascript. Javascript made it possible to create scripts in webpages. This could be used for websites such as online stores and more.
As websites continued to develop more features for html were released. These allowed you to do much more than what you could previously do.