50 Fun Facts About Web Development

The world's first webcam, switched on at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch over what?

A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was filmed so researchers elsewhere in the building could see whether it was empty before making the trip. The camera was finally switched off in 2001.

The Firefox browser, called Phoenix until a trademark dispute, is named after a nickname for which animal?

Red panda is the animal behind the name, even though the logo shows a stylised fox. The browser was briefly called Firebird in between, until a database project of that name objected.

Which Pacific island nation earns millions of dollars a year by leasing out its .tv internet domain?

Tuvalu was assigned .tv as its country code long before streaming video made the two letters valuable. By 2019 royalties from the domain supplied about a twelfth of the government's revenue.

Which English computer scientist wrote the 1989 proposal at CERN that became the World Wide Web?

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal in March 1989, and his manager judged it "vague, but exciting". He went on to build the first browser and the first web server himself.

Which filler text, scrambled from a work by Cicero, do designers paste into unfinished web page layouts?

Lorem ipsum is a garbled version of De finibus bonorum et malorum, in which Cicero argues that pleasure should be pursued rationally. Words were added and removed until it stopped being real Latin.

HTTP status code 418, written as a 1998 April Fools' joke, has a server announce that it is what?

A teapot is what the server claims to be, refusing to brew a drink it was never built for. Developers loved the gag so much that a 2017 push to delete code 418 from popular software was dropped after an outcry.

Which small data files, devised at Netscape by Lou Montulli in 1994, let websites remember returning visitors?

Cookies take their name from "magic cookies", an older Unix term for a packet of data a program receives and sends back unchanged. Montulli patented the web version, and the patent was granted in 1998.

Which image format, released by CompuServe in 1987, was meant to be pronounced like a brand of peanut butter?

GIF was meant to echo Jif peanut butter, and creator Steve Wilhite used his 2013 Webby Award speech to reject the hard-G pronunciation. Polls suggest most people say it the hard way anyway.

Which food gives its name to the three-line menu icon Norm Cox designed for the 1981 Xerox Star computer?

Hamburger was never the intent: Cox drew the three bars to look like lines of text on a small printed menu. The icon's three-dot cousins are nicknamed the kebab and the meatball.

Which animal stars in the hidden running game Google Chrome shows when a computer loses its internet connection?

A dinosaur, a pixelated Tyrannosaurus rex, has been jumping over cacti in the browser since 2014. Its makers said in 2018 that about 270 million games were being played every month.

In HTML, the web page language first publicly described in 1991 with only 18 tags, what does the M stand for?

Markup comes from publishing, where editors marked up paper manuscripts with handwritten instructions for the typesetter. The tags in a web page do the same job for a browser.

In HTML, the one-letter tag a, which wraps text to make a clickable link, is short for which word?

Anchor is the element's full name: in hypertext, an anchor is the spot in a document where a link starts or ends. Developers often misuse it as a fake button by pointing it at a bare # symbol.

Which HTML attribute supplies the text a screen reader speaks aloud in place of an image?

The alt attribute also appears on screen when an image cannot be displayed. Old versions of Internet Explorer wrongly showed it as a hover tooltip, which led many developers to misuse it for extra captions.

Which HTML element, introduced by Apple in 2004 to power Dashboard widgets, lets scripts draw graphics on a page?

The canvas element began as an Apple-only invention, and critics argued the company should have backed the existing SVG standard instead. Apple later made its patents on the idea available royalty-free.

Which nonstandard HTML tag, first introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, makes text scroll across the page?

The marquee tag was Internet Explorer's counterpart to Netscape's blinking-text tag. At a 1996 standards meeting, Netscape agreed to give up blink only if Microsoft got rid of marquee.

Which declaration at the very top of an HTML file stops browsers from rendering the page in quirks mode?

DOCTYPE tells a browser to follow modern standards. Leave it out and the page drops into quirks mode, which keeps the non-standard behaviour of old browsers alive so that pages built for them still display.

Which 1993 web browser, built by Marc Andreessen's team at NCSA, was the first to show images inline with text?

Mosaic was not the first browser, but it was the first that novices found easy to install, and its inline pictures proved hugely appealing. Andreessen soon left to co-found the company behind Netscape.

Which tiny website image, shown in browser tabs, did Microsoft introduce in 1999 to mark bookmarked pages?

Favicon is short for favorite icon, because Internet Explorer 5 showed it beside pages saved in its Favorites list. It was originally a file named favicon.ico placed in a site's root directory.

Which address, registered by a Massachusetts computer maker in March 1985, was the first .com domain name?

symbolics.com belonged to Symbolics, a spin-off from MIT's AI Lab that built computers designed to run Lisp. The company went bankrupt, but the address lived on and was sold to an investor in 2009.

Which word for documents joined by clickable links did Ted Nelson coin in 1965, decades before the web existed?

Hypertext was Nelson's word for his model of linked content. His own system, Project Xanadu, was begun in 1960 but did not release even an incomplete version until 1998, years after the web had taken off.

In CSS, the stylesheet language first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994, what does the C stand for?

Cascading refers to the priority scheme that decides which rule applies when more than one matches the same element. Lie developed the language with Bert Bos and later became technology chief at Opera.

In the CSS box model, which layer of space sits between an element's content and its border?

Padding caused years of layout headaches, because old versions of Internet Explorer counted it inside an element's stated width while the official standard added it on top.

Which CSS property decides which of two overlapping positioned elements is drawn in front of the other?

The z-index property is named for the Z-axis, along which elements are ordered from front to back. On an ordinary element it does nothing until position is set to something other than static, a classic source of confusion.

Which named CSS colour was added in 2014 in memory of web standards author Eric Meyer's six-year-old daughter?

The colour rebeccapurple, hex #663399, honours Rebecca Meyer, who died of a brain tumour on her sixth birthday. Her father's books and talks had made him one of the best-known teachers of CSS.

In CSS, the hex code #0000FF, which can also be written rgb(0, 0, 255), produces which pure colour?

Blue is the last of the three channels in a hex code, so only the final pair of digits is switched on here. Six hex digits can describe 16,777,216 different colours.

Which website platform, co-founded by Matt Mullenweg in 2003, names its major releases after jazz musicians?

WordPress began as a fork of b2/cafelog, an abandoned blogging tool that ran only about 2,000 blogs. Its jazz tradition includes version 5.0, named Bebo after the Cuban musician Bebo Valdés.

Which approach, named by Ethan Marcotte in a 2010 article, makes one website reshape its layout to fit any screen?

Responsive web design, as Marcotte defined it, rests on three ingredients: fluid grids, flexible images and media queries. His article appeared in the online magazine A List Apart.

Which server-side scripting language, created by Rasmus Lerdorf and released in 1995, has an elephant as its mascot?

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, because Lerdorf wrote its first pieces to maintain his own site. The mascot, designed by Vincent Pontier in 1998, is known as the elePHPant.

Which Adobe browser plug-in, once the standard for web animation and games, was finally switched off at the end of 2020?

Flash never ran on the iPhone, and in 2010 Steve Jobs published an open letter attacking its closed design and security problems. Adobe ended support on December 31, 2020.

Which 11-line npm package, deleted by programmer Azer Koçulu in 2016, broke thousands of software builds worldwide?

The left-pad package did nothing more than add characters to the start of a string. Koçulu pulled all his code in protest after npm handed one of his package names to the messaging company Kik.

Which Netscape programmer wrote the first version of JavaScript in just ten days in 1995?

Brendan Eich had joined Netscape in April 1995 and rushed the work to meet the beta schedule for Navigator 2.0. He had originally been hired to put the Scheme language into the browser.

Which code name did JavaScript carry inside Netscape in 1995 before it was renamed LiveScript that September?

Mocha lasted only a few months. The final name arrived that December in a joint announcement with Sun Microsystems, and the language's own creator later called it a marketing ploy to ride the popularity of Java.

Under which official name, a compromise between Netscape and Microsoft, has JavaScript been standardised since 1997?

ECMAScript takes its name from Ecma International, the standards body that adopted the first edition in June 1997. The language's own creator complained that it sounds like a skin disease.

In JavaScript, what does the typeof operator return for null, because of a bug in the very first implementation?

It returns "object", a leftover from how the first engine stored values: null happened to share the type tag 0 with objects. A fix was later proposed for the language standard but rejected.

Which special JavaScript value is the only one that is not equal to itself, even in a strict comparison?

NaN stands for Not-A-Number, and it compares as unequal to every value, including another NaN. Developers exploit the quirk: the test x !== x is true only when x is NaN.

Which JavaScript keyword, recommended over let by many style guides, declares a variable that cannot be reassigned?

A const variable cannot be reassigned, but that does not freeze its contents: an array declared this way can still have new items pushed into it.

Which text-based data format did Douglas Crockford specify in the early 2000s as a low-overhead alternative to XML?

JSON came with a licence clause saying the software "shall be used for Good, not Evil", which Crockford added to mock corporate lawyers. He sent the first message in the format in April 2001.

Which runtime, written by Ryan Dahl in 2009, lets JavaScript run on a server instead of inside a browser?

Node.js is built on V8, the engine Google open-sourced alongside Chrome in 2008. Dahl handed the project over in 2012 to the creator of its package manager, npm.

Which JavaScript library, created by John Resig in 2006, is usually called through a function named with a dollar sign?

jQuery became the most widely deployed JavaScript library on the web by a large margin. Resig created it at the BarCamp NYC gathering, building on an earlier library called cssQuery.

Which Microsoft superset of JavaScript, developed with C# architect Anders Hejlsberg, compiles back into JavaScript?

TypeScript went public in October 2012 after two years of internal work at Microsoft. Hejlsberg had already created Turbo Pascal and Delphi before he became the lead architect of C#.

Which two-word phrase does the HTTP specification suggest for status code 404?

Not Found is the standard phrase, though most sites dress it up with a custom error page. A "soft 404" is a missing page that wrongly reports itself as loaded successfully, which confuses search engines.

Which HTTP request method, often used for file uploads, sends a web form's data in the message body?

POST carries a form's contents in the body of the request, so the data can be of any type and any size. A GET request instead passes its data in the query string of the web address.

The hostname localhost, which reaches a server on a developer's own machine, normally resolves to which IPv4 address?

The address 127.0.0.1 is the standard loopback address, so traffic sent to it never leaves the computer. The whole block beginning with 127, more than 16 million addresses, is reserved for the same purpose.

Which system, created by Paul Mockapetris in 1983, translates website names into the numeric addresses computers use?

DNS replaced a single text file called HOSTS.TXT, kept at the Stanford Research Institute, that listed every computer on the network. New machines were added by telephoning its staff during business hours.

Which security protocol did Netscape develop in the mid-1990s to add encrypted HTTPS connections to its browser?

SSL version 1.0 was never publicly released because of serious security flaws. The protocol was later renamed TLS, reportedly so the standards body would not seem to be rubber-stamping Netscape's work.

Which web attack is nicknamed Bobby Tables after a 2007 xkcd cartoon about a pupil with a destructive name?

SQL injection works by slipping database commands into an ordinary input field. In the cartoon, a boy's full name ends with a command that would delete his school's entire table of students.

Which web server did Russian developer Igor Sysoev create to handle ten thousand connections at once?

Nginx, pronounced "engine x", was built for the Russian portal Rambler, where it was serving 500 million requests a day by 2008. Rambler later claimed to own the code, and police raided Nginx's Moscow offices in 2019.

In URL, the web address format defined in 1994, what does the letter L stand for?

Locator completes the name Uniform Resource Locator. The format's inventor later said that the two slashes after the colon were unnecessary.

Which word, a relic of the 1990s browser wars, still opens the user agent string sent by almost every browser?

Mozilla survives because 1990s web servers often sent advanced pages, frames included, only to browsers that identified themselves that way, so rivals copied the word. Older Opera versions were a rare exception, opening with Opera instead.

Which architectural style for web APIs did Roy Fielding define in his 2000 doctoral dissertation at UC Irvine?

REST is short for representational state transfer. Fielding distilled it from the design of the web itself, having helped to create the HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 standards.