History HTML

History HTML

A Brief Overview On The History Of HTML

Congratulations and let me extend a warm Welcome To The World Of Cyberspace if you are here you have taken the first step to become an active participant in what has become the biggest most phenomenal communication information highway in the history of mankind..

First off let me do an overview on the history of the World Wide Web and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

The Father of WWW - Tim Berners - Lee

Tim BL was the driving force behind the development of the WWW. He wrote the first WWW client and the first WWW server and defined standards such as URL, HTML and HTTP while working at CERN.
Prior to that, he was a founding director of Image Computer Systems and a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, England.
He has graduated at Oxford University. Tim has got a wife and two children.

Hyper Text Markup Language - HTML

All WWW pages are written in HTML. While some files may have different file extensions (such as .cfm or .asp), their core is still HTML.
HTML is no real language such as C++ or Pascal, it is just a system for describing documents. A WWW browser interprets the HTML - code and displays it.
HTML is a special version of SGML (is used by big companies for exchange of data) focused on Hypertext. HTML code is written in ASCII - format. This is a big advantage, because ASCII can be read by about any platform (IBM, Macintosh, UNIX,...) thus making the WWW usable for any platform as long as viewer programs, the browsers, exist.
The current standard defined by he W3 Consortium is HTML 4.

It all started with HTML 1.0. This was no official standard. HTML 1.0 is just what the first real popular browser, Mosaic, could do. The first official version of HTML was 2.0. This is till the most basic standard when it comes to web pages. If you want a page to be readable by any browser, use HTML 2.0. A more sensible and newer standard is HTML 3.2. HTML 3.0 was refined because it was not widely accepted.
With the advent of Cascading Stylesheets and HTML 4.0, HTML returns (at least, this is intended by the W3 Consortium) to its real foundations. By its very nature, HTML is structural language ,not a formatting language. There are tags for formatting text, like <font> or <b>, but these elements were declared "deprecated" by the W3C. The elements not included in the official standard are called "obsolete" elements.

Browsers

What are browsers?
Browsers are programs for displaying HTML-code. They are used for "browsing" the WWW, but also for FTP, USENET or E-Mail. Chances are you're using one right now!

History: The first browsers, Viola and Midas, were released in January 1993 for X - Windows. At the same time, a Macintosh browser was released as an ALPHA - version.
www, a line mode browser, was available for the public on 15th January 1992 via telnet.
The first popular browser was NCSA Mosaic It supported only HTML 1.0. (First ALPHA - version was released in February 1993 [Mosaic for X]).
It was released for all common platforms (X, PC/Windows, Macintosh) in September 1993.

When Marc Andreessen, the mastermind of Mosaic, founded his own company, Mosaic Communications Corp. (now called Netscape), and released a browser, the Netscape Navigator 1.0 , he soon controlled 70% of the browser market.
Microsoft saw this gigantic success and soon released its own browser, the MS Internet Explorer, for free.

When the Internet Explorer 2.0 came out, it did support a few things the Navigator didn't, for example the Marquee - function (scrolling text). Netscape, on the other hand, did not sleep, and they also had a few things Microsoft's program couldn't do. These was for instance the Frame - function, which allows splitting up the browser windows in different sections and the Tables function for Tables.

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