In 1995–1998, the web didn’t have Web Workers—but it definitely had the problem they solve. This chapter traces how early JavaScript, CGI, and form-driven interactivity revealed the need for background processing in browsers.
In the Web’s first years (1990–1994), HTTP’s stateless simplicity left no room for ad tech as we know it. This chapter traces how early HTTP interfaces and the arrival of cookies set up decades of web advertising—and why today’s Privacy Sandbox APIs are a return to constrained, standardized interfaces.
In the Web’s first years (1990–1994), HTTP was tiny, servers were simple, and “APIs” mostly meant speaking basic request/response over the network. Those constraints later produced AJAX—and eventually the Fetch API, which modernized the same fundamental idea.
WebRTC arrived decades later, but its DNA traces back to the Web’s first years: early HTTP rules, headers, content types, and gateway patterns that taught browsers how to negotiate capabilities.