GWT in Action, Second Edition

1.1. Unplanned consequences (or the road to GWT)

If you have kids, you know that sometimes things happen. But sometimes you need to roll with the changes because not even Google with its massive amounts of processing power can predict the future (yet?). And the web, as with most other things in our lives, evolved over time into what it is today. But how did we get here? Let’s take a moment to reflect on the lineage of the modern web.

What we call “the web” got its start in the mid-1990s, but in computing time (and dog years) that’s ancient history. What we need to do is look at more recent history. We’ll fly our time machine past the invention of HTML, past the beginnings of CSS, beyond the browser wars,^[3] and land at a place known as Mountain ...