Browsers

I've already talked about browsers a couple of times before in this series, mentioning browsers introducing features like HTML tables, which got adopted by others and later merged back into standards, browsers transmitting abstruse user agent strings pretending to be someone else, browsers implementing different subsets of past and upcoming standards and so on. So not only due to the fact they are the direct gate to the user of a website, browsers are definitely worth and necessary taking a closer look at.

JavaScript, Frameworks, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, Dart

Introduced in Netscape Navigator 2.0 in 1995 and adopted by Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 as JScript in 1996, JavaScript - or ECMAScript, the name of the vendor-independent standards first published in 1997 - has had many faces: It was a useful toolset to accomplish web developers' tasks, it got misused to just annoy the user, it was misunderstood and brought barriers into websites, but maybe the most important: It is the engine powering many innovations in web development. To just name a couple of buzzwords connected with JavaScript backstage: Ajax, SaaS, HTML5.