Web Standards Programmer's Reference: HTML, CSS, JavaScript®, Perl, Python®, and PHP

19.1. History of JavaScript

In the early days of the World Wide Web, it became obvious to the Netscape team that rudimentary scripting would improve the medium greatly. JavaScript was created in 1996, released with Netscape 2.0, to fill that role and is still the most popular scripting language used on the Web. The Netscape team that created JavaScript was the same team that created the Netscape browser — a team that understood the innovations the Web was bringing to the Internet. The scripting language was designed to be integrated into the user agent and to be able to parse details of any document the agent rendered and affect changes in some elements. The parsing was available because of the time the team took to construct the Document Object Model (DOM), a method to access document links, anchors, form and form objects, and other objects.

Shortly after the base language was constructed, it was turned over to the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) for standardization. The ECMA produced the ECMAscript standard, which embodied most of the features and capabilities of the JavaScript language. Additional capabilities were added to JavaScript over the next few years and matured as other technologies (such as CSS) matured as well.

Despite its naming, JavaScript is not Java. It inherited the moniker "Java" due to many similarities with Sun's Java language. However, the similarities today are slight — noticeable to most programmers, but slight.

VBScript is an extension ...