anglepoised

A personal timeline of front-end web work

I’ve been thinking about how much the process of building websites has changed since I laid down my first crappy frameset nearly fifteen years ago, so thought I’d make a quick timeline to track:

  • Significant browser releases (for context)
  • Notable techniques
  • Reading material
  • Software (editors or tools)
  • Back-end (mostly integrating into rather than developing with)

The dates refer to when I first started using something rather than the release, publication or documentation date.

1998 and before

1999

  • Internet Explorer 5.0 and Netscape Communicator 4.7
  • HTML 4.0 and tables for layout
  • HTML Goodies and Webmonkey
  • Microsoft FrontPage 98
  • Perl scripts and Microsoft Access

2000

  • Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape 6
  • HTML 4.01 and tables for layout
  • Dreamweaver 3 Bible
  • Dreamweaver
  • Dreamweaver templates

2001

2002

A bit of a lost year; picked up the rudiments of PHP & MySQL, rolled my own blogging thing.

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

  • Firefox 3 and Google Chrome (hurrah, rapid release cycle)
  • Rapid prototyping with UX people
  • Web Form Design
  • Bad PHP

2009

  • Internet Explorer 8.0 and Android
  • Dynamic script loaders, Modernizr and cufón
  • Even Faster Web Sites
  • Git, GitHub and VirtualBox
  • Lots of static templates managed with Subversion; still a marginally better approach than the alternatives but no one really likes this

2010

2011

2012

2013