Most significantly, the drawings and animations could be embedded into HTML web pages with the company’s Java-based plug-in, FutureSplash Player. It was described as “a 2D animation product for the World Wide Web” that enabled users “to create vector-based drawings and buttons and then animate them.” Source: The Web Design Museum From a web development perspective, the real history starts in August 1996 when a company called FutureWave Software released an animation tool called FutureSplash Animator. The second edition, published in 1997, replaced the PDF primer with a new chapter: “A CSS Primer.” That’s how fast web design changed after 1996! Flash: Low-End Multimedia For the Massesįlash has a long and involved business backstory, but we’re going to skip all that. It had a chapter entitled “A PDF Primer,” but did not mention CSS (as the final spec hadn’t yet been released). It advocated for “hacks” to HTML, such as table-based layouts, in order to make websites more visually appealing. The first edition of this book came out before CSS or Flash. David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites, 1996Īside: I used the term “ killer website” deliberately, as an homage to an influential web design book from 1996 (that I myself bought), David Siegel’s Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design. If you wanted to create a killer website in the 1990s, Flash was the tool that many web designers of that time reached for. Yet only one of them led to an explosion of visual creativity on the web…and it wasn’t the open web standard. Both aimed to expand the state of web design on the web during the mid-to-late 1990s. Which they did, en masse.ĬSS and Flash had similar goals in 1996. The Flash player was a browser plug-in, so all it needed was for users to download that plug-in. Thirdly, and most crucially - at least for the first several years - Flash didn’t rely on the leading browser companies implementing it. Almost anything was possible using Flash, with the only constraint being the bandwidth limitations of the time. Secondly, it could do much more, visually, than CSS. Firstly, the tool was easy to learn (unlike CSS). In fact, Flash couldn’t have been more different from CSS - the software was not open source, the source file format (FLA) was proprietary, and the output did not conform to web standards.īut Flash had a few important things going for it. Also unlike CSS, Flash was a proprietary tool owned by a single corporation: a company called Macromedia. The over-riding principle was separation of content and presentation, with content marked up in HTML and presentation in CSS.Īt the other end of the web design spectrum was the animation tool Flash, in which presentation and content were mashed together in one file. Design elements were to be encoded in a new language, CSS, as defined in a W3C web standards specification. The first, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), represented structure. There were two stylistically opposed approaches to web design, epitomized by two distinct - and utterly different - technologies, both of which debuted in 1996. During the same time period, there were experiments happening on the presentation side of the web what eventually became known as web design.Įven though web programmers had their differences ( JavaBeans or ActiveX?), web design in the 1990s became a much more deeply divided occupation. After the birth of web apps in 1993 with CGI scripts, followed by startups like Yahoo using Perl code to create dynamic websites in 1994, and then client-side interactivity arriving in 1995 with Netscape’s JavaScript, the web was evolving fast into a full-stack programming platform.
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