Web Development
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50 free Web Development trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Web development is a young craft with a surprisingly rich history. In about three decades the web grew from a proposal at a physics lab into the platform behind nearly every business, and along the way it picked up in-jokes, rivalries and happy accidents that every developer ends up hearing about. This quiz covers the fundamentals a working developer is expected to know: HTML elements and attributes, CSS layout and colour, JavaScript's quirks, HTTP methods and status codes, domain names, security and servers. Mixed in are the stories behind the tools, from the browser wars of the 1990s to the frameworks and libraries that shape sites today. It is written for web developers who want to check what they know, for students revising the basics, and for anyone hosting a tech-themed quiz night. The opening questions are friendly to anyone who uses the web, the later ones reward people who build for it, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The world's first webcam, switched on at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch over what?
A coffee pot
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.
Q 02The Firefox browser, called Phoenix until a trademark dispute, is named after a nickname for which animal?
Red panda
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.
Q 03Which Pacific island nation earns millions of dollars a year by leasing out its .tv internet domain?
Tuvalu
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.
Q 04Which English computer scientist wrote the 1989 proposal at CERN that became the World Wide Web?
Tim Berners-Lee
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.
Q 05Which filler text, scrambled from a work by Cicero, do designers paste into unfinished web page layouts?
Lorem ipsum
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.
Q 06HTTP status code 418, written as a 1998 April Fools' joke, has a server announce that it is what?
A teapot
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.
Q 07Which small data files, devised at Netscape by Lou Montulli in 1994, let websites remember returning visitors?
Cookies
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.
Q 08Which image format, released by CompuServe in 1987, was meant to be pronounced like a brand of peanut butter?
GIF
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.
Q 09Which food gives its name to the three-line menu icon Norm Cox designed for the 1981 Xerox Star computer?
Hamburger
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.
Q 10Which animal stars in the hidden running game Google Chrome shows when a computer loses its internet connection?
A dinosaur
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.
Q 11In HTML, the web page language first publicly described in 1991 with only 18 tags, what does the M stand for?
Markup
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.
Q 12In HTML, the one-letter tag a, which wraps text to make a clickable link, is short for which word?
Anchor
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.
Q 13Which HTML attribute supplies the text a screen reader speaks aloud in place of an image?
alt
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.
Q 21In CSS, the stylesheet language first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie in 1994, what does the C stand for?
Cascading
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.
Q 22In the CSS box model, which layer of space sits between an element's content and its border?
Padding
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.
Q 23Which CSS property decides which of two overlapping positioned elements is drawn in front of the other?
z-index
Q 14Which HTML element, introduced by Apple in 2004 to power Dashboard widgets, lets scripts draw graphics on a page?
canvas
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.
Q 15Which nonstandard HTML tag, first introduced in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, makes text scroll across the page?
marquee
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.
Q 16Which declaration at the very top of an HTML file stops browsers from rendering the page in quirks mode?
DOCTYPE
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.
Q 17Which 1993 web browser, built by Marc Andreessen's team at NCSA, was the first to show images inline with text?
Mosaic
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.
Q 18Which tiny website image, shown in browser tabs, did Microsoft introduce in 1999 to mark bookmarked pages?
Favicon
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.
Q 19Which address, registered by a Massachusetts computer maker in March 1985, was the first .com domain name?
symbolics.com
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.
Q 20Which word for documents joined by clickable links did Ted Nelson coin in 1965, decades before the web existed?
Hypertext
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.
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.
Q 24Which named CSS colour was added in 2014 in memory of web standards author Eric Meyer's six-year-old daughter?
rebeccapurple
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.
Q 25In CSS, the hex code #0000FF, which can also be written rgb(0, 0, 255), produces which pure colour?
Blue
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.
Q 26Which website platform, co-founded by Matt Mullenweg in 2003, names its major releases after jazz musicians?
WordPress
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.
Q 27Which approach, named by Ethan Marcotte in a 2010 article, makes one website reshape its layout to fit any screen?
Responsive web design
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.
Q 28Which server-side scripting language, created by Rasmus Lerdorf and released in 1995, has an elephant as its mascot?
PHP
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.
Q 29Which Adobe browser plug-in, once the standard for web animation and games, was finally switched off at the end of 2020?
Flash
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.
Q 30Which 11-line npm package, deleted by programmer Azer Koçulu in 2016, broke thousands of software builds worldwide?
left-pad
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.