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 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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Replying to
is writing a book about this stuff… hey Sam, send Maggie your draft
🎉 My next tweet was going to lament the lack of fat, narrative, well-researched books on the history of the web from the perspective of devs, designers, and early bloggers
Too recent to see the forest for the trees. But we can at least start to describe the fuzzy shape of things
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Sent you a DM!
Feels like there was an “interactive if you’re on a Flash page” era, say 2003-2012.
Then an “interactive if you’re using a SaaS app” era, say 2012 to today
I think we’re headed towards a “mostly interactive” world in the next few years. The tech exists, but…
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