On the early web, launched two years after Berners-Lee’s proposal, you could click links to other pages and files, read text, and—well, that’s about it. But it’s no exaggeration to say an entire ecosystem emerged from Berners-Lee’s simple components. As web browsers became more sophisticated, so too did the web. The Mosaic browser from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications popularized inline images. Netscape, founded by former Mosaic developers, delivered more sophisticated tools for the visual design of pages. More importantly, Netscape 2.0 introduced the JavaScript programming language in late 1995, which enabled web developers to add more interactivity to their sites.

At first JavaScript could only be used for simple things, like ensuring that you filled out all the "required" fields on a form before submitting it. But by 2006, JavaScript and other web technologies had become powerful enough to build complex applications like Google Docs. The additional utility came at a cost. In 2016 the typical website reached the size, in megabytes, of the original 1993 version of the videogame Doom. Thanks to ads and ad tracking scripts, an apparently simple webpage could now take up multiple floppy disks. And the median size just keeps growing.

With each leap forward in its underlying technologies, the web has become ever more useful—and ever more annoying. The ability to open multiple windows was a handy feature, but it also led to the rise of the pop-up ads that plagued the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Browser makers responded to the scourge of pop-up ads with their own built-in pop-up blockers. That endless cat-and-mouse dynamic might be reason enough to retreat from the web to apps. But these escape hatches tend to just lead right back to the web.

In 2010, WIRED proclaimed that the web was dead. That pronouncement was premature, partially because links to web content became the currency of social media. But also because the web had become so powerful that its underlying technologies are now used to build mobile and desktop apps. For example, the desktop versions of apps like Slack, Discord, and Spotify are actually built on Google’s Chromium web browser. They are, in essence, web browsers that serve up only a single web application. Countless mobile applications work much the same way.

That’s because creating multiple versions of an app for different operating systems is a lot of work. The web, all the way back to Berners-Lee’s original proposal, was always meant to be cross-platform. In recent years, tools like Electron, a toolkit open-sourced by GitHub and used by Slack and Discord to make their desktop apps, and React Native, a Facebook creation for building mobile apps with JavaScript, have brought the idea of using web technologies to create native applications into the mainstream. For example, Microsoft used Electron to build its desktop code-editing tool VS Code.

Even apps that aren’t necessarily repurposed web browsers rely heavily on web technologies. Apple News and podcasting apps rely on a web format called Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to slurp up the content that they present to you. And behind the scenes, servers still use the successor protocols to Berners-Lee’s original HTTP to communicate with one another.

The web proved so powerful that instead of being killed by apps, it remade computing in its own image.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com