Web development continues to become a popular and in-demand career. No wonder there are many students and career makers who want to pursue this industry. Aside from getting a fulfilling salary, web development also offers a wide range of career opportunities no matter what industry you are interested in. If you are still completing a web development course or planning to make a career shift, it is essential to learn the history of web development. This way, you can understand it better and know how important it is.

Understanding Web Development

Do web developers only create websites? Probably, some of you might answer yes. However, web developers can do more than developing websites. You can expect more when you complete a course on web development. So what is web development? How did it start? Let’s all find out.

Web development doesn’t only refer to creating websites. It also deals with building and maintaining websites, including web design, web programming, web publishing, and database management. Most of the time, people confuse the jobs of a web designer with web developers. Know that not all web designers can do the tasks of a web developer. However, most web developers can deal with web design. So what is their difference?

Web Development vs. Web Design

A web designer is a person behind an appealing website. He designs a website using HTML or CSS. To make it a real website, a web designer needs help from a web developer. Web developers turn the web designs into functional websites using different programming languages. They also maintain and update a database using a dynamic website.

Web development includes various web content creation types such as coding web pages, building websites, and updating blogs. WebDev beginners who may not know the history of web development and didn’t complete a course in the said field usually learn from content management systems. Among the popular CMS include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. These content management systems made it easy for web development enthusiasts to create and edit websites using a web-based interface.

The History of Web Development

Have you ever wondered how web development started? To give you a brief history, it is essential to know the World Wide Web inventor. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, born in London, invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Lee’s parents were early computer scientists who had worked for the earliest computers, 

While working at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, Lee noticed that people were having challenges in sharing information. They need to log in to different computers to get the information they need. This is quite challenging because some computers require them to learn a computer language, which is not easy.

Lee thought of using hypertext to exploit the emerging technology that can help them share information to solve the problem. He proposed a project, but it wasn’t accepted at first. However, Lee was allowed to work on the project in September 1990. He began the work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products.

By October of 1990, Lee had written the three fundamental technologies that work as the foundation of today’s web. Among these technologies include:

• HyperText Markup Language (HTML) – It refers to the markup language for the web. You can learn more from this HTML tutorial.
• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) – It is commonly called a URL. URI is a kind of “address” unique and used to identify each resource on the web.
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – It allows for retrieving linked resources from across the web.

The Growth of the World Wide Web

Besides the languages that people still use today, Lee also wrote the first web page editor/browser, called the “WorldWideWeb.app” and the first web server, “httpd. “ The first web page was served on the open internet in 1990. Meanwhile, in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join the said new web community. There is no doubt that the web began to grow. That’s why Lee and others advocated ensuring that CERN would agree to make an underlying code available on a royalty-free basis. This decision was announced in April 1993.

Every problem has a solution. And the difficulty in sharing information led to the discovery of the World Wide Web, which is significant to web development. Through Lee’s discovery, many problems were solved in regards to computer problems. Nowadays, more and more people are interested in this industry and want to become web development experts. This history of web development is just an overview of what had happened, but knowing how WebDev started can increase your interest in pursuing this career. If you want to learn more about web development, you may read more of our blogs, which cover everything from coding tutorials to the best way to learn python.

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