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Chapter 2: The Origins of HTML

HTML, had its origin back in the early days of the Internet. The Internet was already being used, primarily by research scientists, to exchange research, manuscripts, and data. Many people realized that this new electronic communication medium had great potential. What was needed was a standard way of creating documents so they would be accessible and viewable over the Internet. Central to this was the idea of a hyperlink, a way of linking related documents together so the user could easily move from one document to the other.

At this time, Tim Berners-Lee was a researcher at a lab in Europe. He took on this challenge and soon came up with a simple markup language that met the most important requirements, namely:

A means to link documents together no matter where on the Internet they were located.
A way to add simple formatting to a document, such as paragraphs, bold and italicized text, and headings.
A method for displaying images in the document.

With some help from others, Tim developed the first version of HTML. It was a lot simpler than what we use today, but all the basic pieces were in place. Tim did not try to patent his invention but put it in the public domain where it was and still is freely available for anyone to use (Bravo, Tim!). Its use spread rapidly and hence the World Wide Web was born. It may be hard to believe, but the first version of HTML came out in the early 1990s, barely more than a decade ago as this is being written. This does not seem like nearly enough time for the Web to have grown to its current size and importance, but that's what happened.

The picture would not be complete without a browser. While today's browsers are quite complex, with all sorts of bells and whistles, their primary function is simple and exactly the same as it has always been: to read an HTML document (note that I use the terms HTML document and Web page interchangeably) and display it on-screen according to the markup that the document contains. This relates to an important distinction between source code and HTML rendering:

The rendering of an HTML document is what the user sees in his or her browser. It is formatted content only--no HTML tags are seen.
The HTML source code is what's actually in the document, content and HTML alike. It's what you'll be working on as you create and edit Web pages.

Browsers offer a way to view the source code for the current HTML document. In Internet Explorer it is View|Source; in Mozilla FireFox it is View|Page Source. We'll be using these commands a lot in this book because viewing the source is a great way to understand the HTML behind great--and not so great--Web pages.

Internet versus World Wide Web

Some people use these two terms interchangeably but they really mean different things. The Internet is the physical structure that provides the connectivity--the servers, routers, cable and satellite connections, fiber

optics, and computers all over the world. The World Wide Web is the entire collection of all linked documents and images that are available on the Internet.

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