JavaScript

Click to the right to see JavaScript in action.

JavaScript. Spawned in 1995 by the need to make Netscape Navigator's newly added support for Java applets more accessible to non-Java programmers and web designers, a powerful scripting language too often described as "simple."

Netscape 2 was released in early 1996 and offered completely new technologies created by the Netscape group, the most important of which were frames and JavaScript. JavaScript was a programming language written by Brendan Eich that was able to be embedded in Web pages and could process numbers and modify the contents of forms. While in development, JavaScript had been known as Mocha then LiveWire then LiveScript. Its core script syntax closely resembled Java, so it was renamed JavaScript when it was released. The way it referenced forms, links and anchors as children of the document object, and inputs as children of their parent form became known as the DOM level 0.

The same year, Netscape passed their JavaScript language to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) for standardisation. The ECMA produced the ECMAscript standard, which embodied the JavaScript core syntax, but did not specify all aspects of the DOM level 0. With the release of Netscape 3 later in the same year, Netscape had produced JavaScript 1.1, which could also change the location of images, bringing on a wave of Web sites that used this most popular of Web page effects, making images change when the mouse passed over them. The images were also referenced as children of the document object and thus the DOM level 0 was completed.