MEDIAART 3D03: The web of the 1990s

As is so often the case in Web matters, the Wikipedia article about the World Wide Web is a good starting point and reference.

1989 is the usual date given for it, so a bit ahead of Gopher but essentially overlapping with it (and I think it shows how ideas of this sort were kind of in the air in that moment / had been percolating for a while, c.f. the discussion of hypertext and hyperlinks in other and earlier systems in the above Wikipedia article).

It is important to distinguish the history (and function) of the "Web" from that of the "Internet", even though those two terms are sometimes conflated in everyday discourse.

What were the key parts of the world wide web back in the early 1990s?

• http protocol (hyper-text transfer protocol: describing how web documents are requested/transmitted), including the basic structure of URLs (describing how web documents are "located")
• the HTML "language" (describing the "content" of web documents)
• the earliest web browsers: WorldWideWeb/Nexus (1990), ViolaWWW (1991), Mosaic (1993)
• the first web server, httpd (1990)

What were the parts of the world wide web that came somewhat later?

• cascading style sheets (CSS, 1994-6)
• JavaScript (1995)
• the https protocol (1994, but with a very gradual adoption over the following 2-3 decades) which encrypts all of the things that are not encrypted in the original http protocol
• standardized, specialized web APIs ("application programming interfaces") for all kinds of things that happen inside web browsers nowadays (video calls, audio programming, etc etc etc)

Netscape Navigator, late 1994/early 1995 (and by a circuitous process "becomes" Mozilla Firefox, decades later)

Internet Explorer, included "free of charge" with Windows 1995

This website has a good selection of images of 1990s webpages.