JavaScript was born out of a desire to let HTML authors write scripts directly in their documents. This may seem obvious now, but in the spring of 1995 it was novel and more than a little at odds with both the conventional wisdom (that HTML should describe static document atructure only) and the Next Big Thing (Java applets, which were hyped as the one true way to enliven and extend Web pages). Once I got past these contentions, javaScript quickly shaped up along the following lines.