Abstract:Since the development of the Internet industry, the web front end is constantly developing and changing. On the basis of predecessors, future generations have the honor to walk on the shoulders of predecessors. Front-end development and change are not only inherited iteration, but also continuous innovation and creation.
What is the front end?
Simply put, the browser presented the page, to the user to see, operation is the front end (client); What you don’t see, like some game data, application data, is the back end.
To put it more simply, the front end refers to the browser side, and the back end refers to the server side that provides services and data to the browser.
This is a more accurate description, if speaking in a big way, all you see, web pages, mobile web, small programs, even some apps, belong to the category of the front end.
The origin of the front end
The world’s first computer
Background: During World War II, the U.S. military had scientists build the world’s first computer, ENIAC, to calculate the trajectory of artillery shells.
February 14, 1946, the world’s first computer “ENIAC” (ENIAC) was born in the University of Pennsylvania. It was the work of a group of researchers, but it was the design ideas of mathematician Von Neumann that played a key role, so it is called “the father of modern computing”.
Meaning: It marked the beginning of the computer age.
Guess what!! This Big Boy was the ancestor of our modern computer! ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
(Photo source: Baidu Photo)
The precursor of the Internet
Background: During World War II, the U.S. military lost communications in case parts of its network were destroyed.
In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established a military network called ARPnet. ARPANET was the precursor to the Internet.
In 1983, APRA and THE US Department of Defense Communications Agency developed the TCP/IP protocol for heterogeneous networks (not covered in this article). After this protocol became popular in society, the real Internet was born.
The birth of Internet and computer laid the foundation for the beginning of front-end technology.
Front-end development has lasted nearly 20 years, which is a relatively long development process. It can be roughly divided into the following stages:
Iii. Prehistoric Times (1990-1995)
Some of the most important events of this era are: the birth of the WWW (1990), the birth of the browser (1992), the creation of the W3C Board (1994), the birth of JavaScript (1995);
- In 1990, the WWW (World Wide Web) was born. Full name: World Wide Web.
- In 1992, THE NCSA developed its first browser, Mosaic, which allowed browsing the Web in Windows. A new generation of browsers followed, Netscape Navigator, in 1994; Owned by Netscape Corporation, collectively referred to as Netscape Corporation.
- In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee created the W3C Board of Directors. Tim Berners-Lee, known as the “father of the World Wide Web”, is a professor at the University of Southampton and MIT. The W3C Board is responsible for the path forward for HTML by facilitating the development of a common protocol. Member institutions: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, European Union for Research in Mathematics and Informatics, Keio University, Japan, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China.
- In 1995, with all this in place, JavaScript was born! The inventor is Brendan Eich.
- The main language features of JavaScript: it draws lessons from the basic syntax of C language; Data types and memory management borrowed from the Java language; Using Scheme language for reference; Self language, using the prototype based inheritance mechanism;
(Screenshot of Netscape Navigator browser, 1994, from Baidu Photo)
Iv. Iron Age (1995~2005)
The browsers of this era were diverse and competitive. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Google are the leading players in this era!
Although there were already relatively uniform standards such as ECMA (JavaScript specification document) and W3C (HTML and CSS specification document), browsers became popular in the market before the standard and became the de facto standard. As a result, we now have to deal with browser compatibility issues (IE compatibility issues are the most common) in our development projects.
With the advent of AJax in 1998, front-end development has been upgraded from Web1.0 to Web2.0, from static pages of pure content to dynamic pages, rich interaction, front-end data processing in the new era. Two of the best known interactive and dynamic browser products during this period were Gmail (2004) and Google Maps (2005).
Due to the increasing demand for dynamic interaction and data interaction, JQuery (2006) is also derived from this cross-browser JS tool library, which is mainly used for DOM operation and data interaction.
The development process of the front end of 2005~2009 involves the knowledge blind area of the small author ~~ also please the big guy who intends to supplement, give the small white people popular science popular science hee hee!
5. JQuery Era (2009-2016)
When jQuery was released in 2006, there was a lot of competition, a lot of competition and it was pretty much flat. It wasn’t until 2009, when the Sizzle selector engine was developed, that jQuery gained overwhelming dominance.
At this point in time, the front end is all about browser compatibility, and jQuery has a lot of solutions for dealing with DOM compatibility.
The popularity of jQuery has indirectly led to the following developments:
- Promote the learning of CSS1~CSS3 selectors
- Promote the native web browser selector engine document querySelectorAll, Element. The birth of matches
- Raise awareness of domReady
- This led to the creation of Promises and requestAnimateFrame
- Lower the threshold of the front end, the front end engineer team is growing.
A number of jquery-like libraries emerged during this period, the most famous of which was Zepto.js. Zepto also marks the beginning of the mobile Internet era.
The era of JQuery started with the birth of RequireJS and ended with the emergence of RN. The appearance of JQuery makes front-end development easier, if engineers want to achieve a function, now search out a JQuery plug-in to achieve.
The next article will continue to bring you the development history of the three framework era, as well as the front-end status quo and the future development trend ha ~ stay tuned!
In the creation process of this paper, there are several references to network information, such as CSDN, wechat public number, etc., thank you for your content contribution ~
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