the self-similar repeating nature of fractals is a metaphor for the growth of the entire Web. this image by Jared tarbell is a revisualization of the familiar mandelbrot set; www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/buddabrot/.

iMage by Jared tarbell

tent. CSS enabled Web developers to flexibly style their content and was in part responsible for reducing their urge to invent new HTML tags purely to achieve a particular visual effect. But by 1998–1999, the browser wars were all but done, with Web developers coding mostly to the then-dominant browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5. New features were no longer necessarily exposed via new tags in the HTML vocabulary; with CSS, a developer could easi-

ly create new presentational structures using the generic div and span tags. The behavior of constructs appearing in Web pages could be customized via JavaScript¹⁸ and the HTML Document Object Model (DOM). ^{2, 23} Thus, as the browser wars came to a close with the Web appearing to settle on HTML4, the Web community was already inventing a new highly interactive Web.

On the negative side, the dominance of a single browser during this period

meant that all new behavior outside the scope of the HTML4 specification was implemented based on Internet Explorer; worse, that implementation in turn was a result of reverse engineering various features from the previously popular Netscape browser. This was particularly true with respect to interactive elements created through JavaScript and the HTML DOM, while incompatibilities between the CSS specifications and the predominant

 

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