In the Beginning there was 0, then 1
Men have always yearned to reach out, to pass on their knowledge and to learn the experience of others. From primitive cave paintings to blog posts on the most advanced technological devices, all are driven by the very same nature that has been embedded in men. Records on cave walls, wooden scrolls or papers barely mount to men's ambition of spreading influences that would reach the edges of the earth and the heavens. Men have always been fantasizing of the capacity to telepathically communicate with each other; they would envision this ability on mortals with super natural power, and gods.
The birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web did not just explode one day, like the big bang. The Internet was envisioned many eons before, people just didn't know what it was, or what form it will take and what it would be called until the early 1990s. Perhaps before its infant stage in the 90s, and even before its embryotic stage, its early bit of cell first hit its ovum stage when Samuel Morse developed the telegraph in the 1830s. The telegraph can only transmit a bit of information at a time, bits formed into a series of on-and-off signals that could be translated into texts and meaningful words. A series of evolution that branched out such as telephone, radio and television which eventually unified into something that its fate has always meant to become, the World Wide Web via the Internet. The web today projects scriptures, images, audio, videos and the ability for people to communicate with each other, both passively or instantaneously.
The web today is dynamic, diverse and rich of contents and multimedia. There are a few projects that could help us see how far the web has progressed; however, to judge a webpage's age could be tricky. The copyright year does not necessary reflect its technological age, a webpage could be be created in the early 1990s with a few minor updates and copyright statements updated in the 2000s, yet maintain its style and html codes that were meant for browsers in the 1990s. Some websites are revamped on the latest version of content management system as recent as 2017, running on HTML5, PHP 7 and so on, yet dressed in a classical theme to give an appearance of antiquity. With such complication in mind, I will try my best to present these web projects from earliest to latest.
The following are a few samples of early webpages developed in the 1990s, starting with The Valley of the Shadow (http://valley.lib.virginia.edu). This webpage is a perfect example of the earliest website, featuring a cover page style as the first landing page, and a button to open the door into the deeper layers of the website. The other samples of a website in the 90s would be The Avalon Project from Yale University (http://avalon.law.yale.edu) and The Library of Congress website (http://memory.loc.gov). These early websites were created with the mindset that a website is more like a digital book, or a home where visitor would see the cover page or the front door of the house first, and the exploration followed after the visitor clicked an option to open up the book or enter the house.
Other pages developed in the 2000s still have this same mentality, however, with more icons, images and interactive abilities such as placing comments as the speed of the internet progressed. The Romantic Circle (http://www.rc.umd.edu) hosts a blog with its oldest post published on September 2003. Persepolis: A Virtual Reconstruction's (http://www.persepolis3d.com) oldest news feed was published on October of 2005. Other projects that developed around the same time share similar style, such as the April 16 Archive (http://www.april16archive.org) that contributed to the V-Tech tragic shooting event that happened in 2007 (last updated in 2011), Digital Karnak (http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak) last updated in 2008, and Dickinson Electronic Archive (http://www.emilydickinson.org) last updated in 2012. In the early 2000s, animated and interactive websites that were powered by Adobe Flash (previously known as Macromedia Flash) was extremely popular. An example of such Flash website is the Lascaux website (http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/fr/00.xml). The exact date of when the last time this Flash website updated was not stated anywhere on the site; however, Flash fell out of favor for web development after the introduction of the iOS by Apple in 2007 so this website must have been last updated around this time frame. Oyez (https://www.oyez.org) is another sample that we can examine. Although their latest news feed was published on June 2nd of this year, this website was designed very much like the early 1990s sites with a minimalist home page and requires visitors to click on an option to enter deeper into the site. This site, however, must have been developed and updated more recently since the photos and images on this site are high resolution with great quality (minimal compression). These high quality photos on the site suggested that it was developed during a time when the internet speed was much faster. Other clues that this website was developed and last updated in recent time are links to their social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, trends that are definitely of this decade.
Most of today's modern websites skip the minimalist cover page and bring visitors directly the latest news feeds and latest featured products filled with multimedia contents (with the exception of search engines or sites that are actually web utilities). The mindset of modern web designers tend to mimic the appeal of window displays and the open space of retail floors rather then the idea of taking visitors from one door to another, exploring one room at a time (or flipping through page by page like a book). In the near future, when processors will be faster and more efficient and the internet speed will be faster as well, today's web design trend will change. For whatever that may come, we are definitely living in the prime time of the internet.
The birth of the Internet and the World Wide Web did not just explode one day, like the big bang. The Internet was envisioned many eons before, people just didn't know what it was, or what form it will take and what it would be called until the early 1990s. Perhaps before its infant stage in the 90s, and even before its embryotic stage, its early bit of cell first hit its ovum stage when Samuel Morse developed the telegraph in the 1830s. The telegraph can only transmit a bit of information at a time, bits formed into a series of on-and-off signals that could be translated into texts and meaningful words. A series of evolution that branched out such as telephone, radio and television which eventually unified into something that its fate has always meant to become, the World Wide Web via the Internet. The web today projects scriptures, images, audio, videos and the ability for people to communicate with each other, both passively or instantaneously.
The web today is dynamic, diverse and rich of contents and multimedia. There are a few projects that could help us see how far the web has progressed; however, to judge a webpage's age could be tricky. The copyright year does not necessary reflect its technological age, a webpage could be be created in the early 1990s with a few minor updates and copyright statements updated in the 2000s, yet maintain its style and html codes that were meant for browsers in the 1990s. Some websites are revamped on the latest version of content management system as recent as 2017, running on HTML5, PHP 7 and so on, yet dressed in a classical theme to give an appearance of antiquity. With such complication in mind, I will try my best to present these web projects from earliest to latest.
The following are a few samples of early webpages developed in the 1990s, starting with The Valley of the Shadow (http://valley.lib.virginia.edu). This webpage is a perfect example of the earliest website, featuring a cover page style as the first landing page, and a button to open the door into the deeper layers of the website. The other samples of a website in the 90s would be The Avalon Project from Yale University (http://avalon.law.yale.edu) and The Library of Congress website (http://memory.loc.gov). These early websites were created with the mindset that a website is more like a digital book, or a home where visitor would see the cover page or the front door of the house first, and the exploration followed after the visitor clicked an option to open up the book or enter the house.
Other pages developed in the 2000s still have this same mentality, however, with more icons, images and interactive abilities such as placing comments as the speed of the internet progressed. The Romantic Circle (http://www.rc.umd.edu) hosts a blog with its oldest post published on September 2003. Persepolis: A Virtual Reconstruction's (http://www.persepolis3d.com) oldest news feed was published on October of 2005. Other projects that developed around the same time share similar style, such as the April 16 Archive (http://www.april16archive.org) that contributed to the V-Tech tragic shooting event that happened in 2007 (last updated in 2011), Digital Karnak (http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Karnak) last updated in 2008, and Dickinson Electronic Archive (http://www.emilydickinson.org) last updated in 2012. In the early 2000s, animated and interactive websites that were powered by Adobe Flash (previously known as Macromedia Flash) was extremely popular. An example of such Flash website is the Lascaux website (http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/fr/00.xml). The exact date of when the last time this Flash website updated was not stated anywhere on the site; however, Flash fell out of favor for web development after the introduction of the iOS by Apple in 2007 so this website must have been last updated around this time frame. Oyez (https://www.oyez.org) is another sample that we can examine. Although their latest news feed was published on June 2nd of this year, this website was designed very much like the early 1990s sites with a minimalist home page and requires visitors to click on an option to enter deeper into the site. This site, however, must have been developed and updated more recently since the photos and images on this site are high resolution with great quality (minimal compression). These high quality photos on the site suggested that it was developed during a time when the internet speed was much faster. Other clues that this website was developed and last updated in recent time are links to their social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, trends that are definitely of this decade.
Most of today's modern websites skip the minimalist cover page and bring visitors directly the latest news feeds and latest featured products filled with multimedia contents (with the exception of search engines or sites that are actually web utilities). The mindset of modern web designers tend to mimic the appeal of window displays and the open space of retail floors rather then the idea of taking visitors from one door to another, exploring one room at a time (or flipping through page by page like a book). In the near future, when processors will be faster and more efficient and the internet speed will be faster as well, today's web design trend will change. For whatever that may come, we are definitely living in the prime time of the internet.
Great discussion here of the characteristics of the different stages of general web developments. You are right about trends in current practice with multimedia, but for my point of view there is nothing more irritating than media that starts running on a page without me clicking on the media to start it.
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