Everything Is a “Web Page”

Before this time, the term computer usually referred to a person, not a machine⁠—someone who would compute (solve) math problems.

By the 1960s, computers were room-sized, institutional electronic machines–used by governments (the military), businesses, and universities. They were used to solve complex math problems and sort data, but were still very slow and didn’t communicate with one another.

A catalyst in the formation of the internet was the Cold War. The threat of nuclear conflict spurred the US Defense Department to consider decentralized and distributed networks⁠—to disseminate orders and information in the event of an attack (and ultimately, for retaliation).

It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind.

The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at US missiles would take out the entire [system] that was highly centralized.

Well, then, let’s not make it centralized. Let’s spread it out so that we can have other paths to get around the damage.

Paul Baran

By 1969, computer nodes connected the Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UCSB and the University of Utah⁠—developed by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA).

Over the following decade, ARPANET would grow to include other cities in the US. It had its first expansion outside the States in 1973, with connections to the UK and Norway. Slowly, similar commercial and academic networks were developing alongside, each with their own communication protocols.

In 1974, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf (two ARPA scientists) developed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol (TCP/​IP). By the 80s, it became the standard network communication format⁠—and still underpins the internet we all use today.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British academic and scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) with his team while working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1989. It was developed on top of TCP/​IP as a standard way to connect documents, living on different computers in different places, via hypertext links.

Their proposal had four components:

1. A text file format to represent the documents: the HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

2. The rules for exchanging these documents: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

3. A program to display (and edit) these documents: the first web browser (called WorldWideWeb)

4. Software that gives access to the documents: the server

By 1991, the first web page was up and running and the web began to take off.

The 1990s then saw more-affordable home computers bring internet access to many more people⁠—escaping the government (military), business, and university settings it had been siloed in before. Early web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape (1993) helped evolve what was possible online⁠—adding color, images, and interactivity.

And the web exploded from there.

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information.

Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.

Tim Berners-Lee

All these desktop “apps” are built in Electron⁠—and so are really just web pages inside a slim, platform-native wrapper. (Essentially, a single-website browser!)

The core application only has to be written once, instead of rewritten for each platform. And why design it all again? (Designers are expensive!) Why hire Windows and Mac devs when you can just hire web devs? …then why hire i⁠OS or Android devs, either? (Developers are even more expensive!) So many companies take approach, for cross-platform development.

The app is really just a web view (browser), and every screen within is a web page.

JavaScript began as a client-side (on your computer), front-end language running in the browser. But now with runtime environments like Node.js, Deno, and Bun, JS has moved to server-side (on the remote computer) functionality previously dominated by scripting languages like ASP, Perl, PHP, and Ruby.

This means that JavaScript doesn’t just run in a webpage you’re looking at–it often now actually builds the page itself. It might even send you the packets. More and more, JS isn’t a part of the stack so much as it really is the stack.

This “JavaScript everywhere” movement means that the tendrils of the web can encompass many non-web-page uses. Maybe it is in an app, maybe a headless data API, maybe a hardware integration, maybe it is even something entirely offline⁠—but it is still web technologies, most of the way down.

In the coming year we are going to dive properly into HTML, CSS, and JS–the fabric of web pages.

Let’s try to also think of these⁠—more conceptually and semantically⁠—as content, form, and function. (Or in another way, skeleton, skin, and muscles.) This ordering or layering of responsibilities is often called progressive enhancement. The semantic content (HTML) forms the foundation on which you can layer the form (CSS) and functionality (JS).

With this understanding, the same model exists in nearly all software. (For example, Resources, Views, and States in Mac/​i⁠OS development, though the lines are being blurred.) So we can say that software that hasn’t yet been eaten by web technologies is often still web-like. And the web is likely coming for them, eventually.