If you had to put a year on it, when would you say the web became meaningfully "interactive"?
Meaning when did we go from static pages of longform text to dynamic components streaming live data and flying 3D interactive articles?
Articles / refs with historical detail welcome 🙏
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I feel like this started with the gen 1 JS frameworks (Angular, Ember), and really took off with React, so around 2013-14.
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iirc, Gmail heralded the arrival of “Ajax” and kickstarted the age of interactive web apps. Everyone and their dog had an “RIA” - Rich Internet Application toolkit to sell.
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cc and who I’m certain have _all_ the stories, since they ran *the* blog on the topic back in the day - ajaxian.com
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I think around 1995-96 with cgi-perl scripts for comments sections in ezines for basic "interactivity" but for all the visual jazz, I'd say it became available with javascript coming of age around 2007 though it took designers 4-5 years to master the idiom
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did a thread touching on this recently
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The boundary between Web1 and Web2 was so subtle and incremental most people outside of tech didn’t even notice when it was crossed: when IE7 supported XmlHttpRequest in 2008, paving the way for rich UIs, JavaScript supremacy starting with jQuery, and what was then called Ajax.
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There’s a lot of interactivity in between those extremes, and I’d argue that the web was interactive very early on, and the pre-web internet (with Usenet, BBSs, etc.) were extremely interactive. Phpbb and vbulletin first came out in 2000, BBCode was 1998 and Blogger 1999.
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And like points out people were hacking together interactive components with Perl scripts a few years before those tools.
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Certainly a key point in the story. Funny it was probably technically possible earlier, but not conceptually/culturally
