Design & HTMLMarkup: In the beginning . . .
Originally Published: 2001-02-21; Updated: 2006
Updated: 2006
Everything has a beginning. Most of those beginnings are offshoots from something else already existing. Same story is true for HTML!
You would not be here reading my words if your parents had never met. Preceding events and circumstances had your parents meeting, which lead to your arrival into the world. Likewise with the birth of HTML where required preceding events occurred spawning its birth. In other words, the Internet had to be born in order to supply other offspring that people would appreciate and be able to use.
The Internet's history begins back in the 1960's. The United States Department of Defense sought a way to store, and rapidly spread, information through a networking system that would function even if part of the network had been affected or non-operative.
It was a success in many ways, as it opened a new avenue of computer use. ARPAnet was introduced to allow colleges and universities access to using this system.
It was later broadened to allow the general public to use this networking system via their personal computers with a modem that worked with a common telephone line. BBS and Usenet newsgroups came to be.
It wasn't until 1993 that Internet is regarded by many to have been officially born. A complicated network of servers and routers that relayed information to personal computers allowed users to communicate with others from all parts of the world. Internet Service Providers [ISPs] offered, for a fee, special dial up numbers where people could connect to the Internet through the modem pools the ISPs created through their own set of servers.
People could "chat" in "real time", write "posts" in other areas on a message board type of set-up, or - in time - have a more permanent area of hosting information they wished to share with others. The last one is what became known as Web Sites and World Wide Web later earned the nickname of being the "Super Information Highway".
The pioneer Web Sites were basically text documents. The most common way of accessing these pages was through Lynx, which is a non-graphical browser still in use today [2005].
A group of physicists at CERN came up with a rustic versioning of a computing language that would allow them to provide structuring and ability to insert images in with their text documents. This language was named Hyper Text Markup Language, more commonly known now as HTML.
In order to read these documents, Mosaic - the first Web Browser - was born to help people see these specially encoded documents. Netscape followed, establishing firmer translation control in how the browser read then rendered HTML documents, then Internet Explorer came to be. Now we have a variety of browsers available (e.g. Opera, Firefox, etc.)!
As you surf the World Wide Web it is more than apparent how this computer language progressed and refined for use. We've advanced from off-white backgrounds only to being able to add other colors choices and later even use graphic images to create a "wallpaper" for sites. Black text is not our only choice, we can select not only other colors but also what colors to have our links to other pages or Sites to appear in. We can even select what font face we wish to have our page's text to appear in!
HTML was tweaked upon and refined to help create a better coding method that would work with the variety of browsers on people's personal computer. With each versioning that resulted, more possibilities of how it could be used on a Web Site became exposed.
Around 1995 to 1996, HTML finally had a foothold in acceptance. HTML 3.2 cleaned up what v2.0 and v3.0 had left unrefined. Part of the thanks is due to release of v3.2 that had rid the language of many of the bugs or glitches in it. Another handshake of thanks may be extended to the advent of places, like GeoCities and, more recently, blogs, that offered individuals from all walks of life an area tell the world about themselves and/or an interest they had.
HTML spawned other thoughts of Web Site design or computer languages to be developed, here are a few that you may have heard of or seen being used on some Web Sites:
- DHTML (Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language)
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- JAVA
- JavaScript
- ActiveX [Also felt, by some, to being the basis of the Browser Wars that resulted in the 90's when Microsoft started creating some of their own HTML-type thoughts limited for only IE use? In 2000 through 2005 ActiveX "script kiddies" helped create headaches for Internet Explorer users due to security flaws and holes.]
- Use of CGI bins with Web Sites
- Perl
- XML
- PHP
- ASP
- and more.