A Brief History
of Javascript
When the World Wide Web was first created in the early 1990s all
web pages were static. When you viewed a web page you saw exactly what the page
was set up to show you and there was no way for you to interact with the page.
Being able to interact
with a web page - have it do something in response to your actions - required
the addition of some form of programming language to "instruct" the
page how it should respond to your actions. In order to have it respond immediately
without having to reload the web page this language needed to be able to run on
the same computer as the browser displaying the page.
At the time there were
two browsers that were reasonably popular - Netscape Navigator and Internet
Explorer. Netscape was the first to bring out a programming language that would
allow web pages to become interactive - they called it Livescript and it
was integrated into the browser (meaning that the browser would interpret the
commands directly without requiring the code to be compiled and without
requiring a plugin to be able to run it). This meant that anyone using the
latest Netscape browser would be able to interact with pages that made use of
this language.
Another programming
language called Java (which required a separate plugin in order to run) became
very well known and so Netscape decided to try to cash in on this by renaming
the language built into their browser to Javascript. Note that while
some Java and Javascript code may appear similar, they are in fact two entirely
different languages that serve completely different purposes.
Not to be left behind
Internet Explorer was soon updated to support not one but two integrated
languages. One was called vbscript and was based on the BASIC
programming language and the other was called Jscript and was very
similar to Javascript. In fact if you were very careful what commands you used
you could write code that would be able to be processed as Javascript by
Netscape Navigator and as Jscript by Internet Explorer.
At the time Netscape
Navigator was by far the more popular browser and so later versions of Internet
Explorer implemented versions of Jscript that were more and more like
Javascript. By the time that Internet Explorer became the dominant browser
Javascript had become the accepted standard for writing interactive processing
to be run in the web browser.
The
importance of this scripting language was too great to leave its future
development in the hands of the competing browser developers and so in 1996
Javascript was handed over to an international standards body called ECMA who
then became responsible for the subsequent development of the language. As a
result of this the language was officially renamed ECMAScript or ECMA-262
but most people still refer to it as Javascript.
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