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How Static Websites Transformed Into Web Applications Over Time
A brief history of the progression of web development in the last few decades and how I experienced it as a young developer
I remember the exact location where I connected to the internet for the first time with a dial-up connection as quite a young boy. It must have been around 1993 — the year in which HTML was initially released.
The internet was brand new.
There were only a handful of websites available in my language and I remember visiting the website of the largest soccer team in our country. I was amazed and realized that the content I was looking at was coming from somewhere else. As young as I was, I understood that this had the potential to become huge.
I didn’t know how right I was at the time and that internet would form the foundation of my career later on:
Obviously, the content I was looking at was extremely simple. It was static, it hardly had any styling applied to it, and it took ages to download. Visting a website back then was not for the impatient among us. But I was fascinated, and I still am.
The websites from those days — a small collection of HTML files— have transformed into technological wonders in my eyes: dynamic web solutions with endless possibilities powered by large stacks of technologies, frameworks, and cloud-based solutions.
But this didn’t happen overnight.
What is the difference between websites and web applications? And how did this progression take place during the last few decades?
I believe that every (aspiring) web developer should have at least a brief understanding of how this evolved. In this article, I will tell you how web technology progressed and how I experienced it.
Let’s have a look!
