Changes

To fully understand the history of JavaScript it is first necessary to go back to a time before Internet Explorer and Firefox dominated the web browser market, and before most of us even knew what a web browser was.

Sadly neither Netscape nor Cafe Verona ultimately stood the test of time. Under attack from Microsoft, Netscape was purchased by AOL where it failed to flourish. Eventually the underlying Netscape browser technology was spun off into the open source Mozilla organization which later spawned the hugely successful Firefox browser. Cafe Verona also fell victim to the dot com implosion and went out of business a few years ago along with many Silicon Valley restaurants that had relied on hungry and wealthly technology workers for their business.

Firefox is not the only legacy of Netscape Corporation however. It was at Netscape that the need for an alternative to the static nature of web pages was first identified.

Recognizing the need for browser or ''client side'' intelligence Netscape began work on a scripting langauge that would enable web designers to imbed code into the HTML of web pages to provide features such as client side validation of user input, dynamic display of data and event driven functionality (for example performing local processing when a push button is pressed or data entered into a text field).

The scripting langauge developed at Netscape was originally called LiveScript. Perhaps in an effort to bask in the reflected glory of Sun Microsystem's Java programming language, LiveScript was later renamed JavaScript, though in reality it bears little or no resemblance to Sun's Java.

A disagreement between Netscape and Microsoft over licensing ultimately led Microsoft to reverse engineer JavaScript and create their own version called JScript. Inevitably differences between the two variants of the language quickly appeared and linger to this day,