The Evolution of the Web

Let’s start at the beginning. Mosaic was released in November of 1993 and it was the first graphical browser to become popular on the Web. At that time HTML 2.0 had not been released, so Mosaic was initially limited in its functionality. Netscape Navigator 1.0 arrived on the scene in December 1994, with support for basic HTML 2.0 elements only. By the time Internet Explorer 2.0 was released in November 1995, browser technology had begun to support more advanced features such as tables and forms. It was now possible to evolve beyond the single linear page of text that passed for Web design during 1994-95.

At this point the Web was still mostly the domain of spotty scientists, who were more interested in publishing the Periodic Table of the Elements than arranging the visual layout of HTML elements. That all changed in about 1996, when Graphic Designers discovered the new medium. In the eighties and early nineties, Desktop publishing (DTP) on Apple Macintoshes was all the rage with graphic designers. The Web was their next challenge.

MSN 1996

YAHOO 1996

Around 1996 Marketing departments started to get interested in the commercial potential of the Web. The Pepsi and Coca-cola Web sites were two interesting examples. Pepsi’s Web site in 1996 was a tour de force of Web technology: Java-animated spinning logo, Shockwave, 3-D VRML, streaming audio, QuickTime. The premier version of the Web site, called “Psychotropic Sundae”, required numerous plug-ins to be downloaded in order for it to work.

Pepsi was one of the first corporate Web sites to fully exploit the Web’s interactivity. It tried to create a virtual world—populated with the “hottest” music, movie previews, digital art, game previews and so on. It even went so far as to nickname its users as “squatters”—people who visited and inhabited Pepsi’s new world.

AOL 1997

In 1997 the Web was still a new phenomenon to most of the population; one of the easiest ways to make the Web seem more familiar, and less alien, was to make the Web look and feel as much like the real world as possible.

1997 was the year the second edition of David Siegel’s book Creating Killer Web Sites came out. It was one of the first Web design books I read. It’s interesting now to look back at this book seven years later. Siegel was famous for encouraging and widely promoting HTML “workarounds” (a nicer term for hacks), in order to obtain the most visually-appealing Web page layouts. The reason he had to do this was because HTML is based on structural rather than presentational principles. So in order to optimize HTML for presentation Siegel had to find ingenious ways to manipulate HTML markup.

STICKY has evolved! Another Web design trend that became popular around 1997 was the notion that Web sites ought to be “sticky”. Web sites should entice people in, like a Venus Flytrap, and keep them entertained long enough to sell them something.

GOOGLE 1999

Over the past decade Web design has gone through many iterations, driven by the ever-changing environment. Web browser vendors have contributed a lot of new features and functionality. The HTML specification has grown from a rigid structurally-based markup language, to an extensible HTML-XML hybrid. And CSS is now widely used to keep structure separate from presentation.

The changing landscape has led corporate Web sites to evolve from textual to multimedia, brochureware to interactive, static to transactional, chaotic to standardized, rigid to extensible, broadcasting to read-write. Web sites are no longer virtual places, they’re more like virtual agents. Today, corporate Web sites exist to serve their users and so their design must be personalized and loosely-coupled.

Web sites will continue to evolve and be products of their environment. Browser and operating system innovation (or lack of) will affect what the Web looks like in another 10 years. XML Web technologies that so far haven’t impinged much on corporate Web sites, like RSS and RDF, will force new ways of designing onto us.

We don’t know what corporate Web sites will look like in 2013, but we do know that Web design will continue to re-invent itself constantly like it did from 1994-2003.