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The History of the WWW and HTML
When you are surfing
through the web you generally see some pages that are
not displayed properly, the frames become all mixed
up and the content become unreadable. Many surfers think
that it is a problem of coding and the blame incompetent
coders. Actually, if you feel better placing blame,
it belongs with the greedy program distributors like
Microsoft and Sun Systems which turned the great educational
idea of Tim Berners-Lee into a competition area and
a complex language not having a standard form.
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the
Web. In 1989, Tim was working in a computing services
section of CERN when he came up with the concept (web);
at the time he had no idea that it would be implemented
on such an enormous scale. Particle physics research
often involves collaboration among institutes from all
over the world. Tim had the idea of enabling researchers
from remote sites in the world to organize and pool
together information. But far from simply making available
a large number of research documents as files that could
be downloaded to individual computers; he suggested
that you could actually link the text in the files themselves.
In other words, there could be cross-references
from one research paper to another. This would mean
that while reading one research paper, you could quickly
display part of another paper that holds directly relevant
text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific and
mathematical nature would thus be represented as a ‘web’
of information held in electronic form on computers
across the world. This, Tim thought, could be done by
using some form of hypertext, some way of linking documents
together by using buttons on the screen, which you simply
clicked on to jump from one paper to another.
Tim’s simple but effective idea
turned out to be the greatest communication device of
humanity even if it was not supported by big companies
and manufacturers. For instance, Hewlett-Packard, in
common with many other large computer companies, was
quite unconvinced that the Internet would be a success;
indeed, the need for a global hypertext system simply
passed them by. For many large corporations, the question
of whether or not any money could be made from the Web
was unclear from the outset.
Later, especially after Mosaic, the
first web browser was released; the competition between
the companies became more obvious. The later version
of Mosaic in competition with the Microsoft Internet
Explorer added new features to the HTML language like
n-compass and active-x controls respectively. Meanwhile,
the World Wide Web Consortium was formed to fulfill
the potential of the Web through the development of
open standards. They had a strong interest in HTML.
Just as an orchestra insisting on the best musicians,
the consortium recruited many of the best-known names
in the Web community headed up by Tim Berners-Lee. During
1995, all kinds of new HTML tags emerged. Some, like
the BGCOLOR attribute of the BODY element and FONT FACE,
which control stylistic aspects of a document, found
themselves in the black books of the academic engineering
community. “You're not supposed to be able to do
things like that in HTML,” they would protest.
In the end, the technology of web was for the pure purpose
of science and technology. It was not supposed to turn
into a multimedia “tool”. It was their belief
that such things as text color, background texture,
font size and font face were definitely outside the
scope of a language when their only intent was to specify
how a document would be organized.
While the W3 Consortium was working
on already the HTML 3, the web design was benefiting
the competition between the Netscape and IE. Even for
the good intentions of the consortium, the big corporations
insisted on creating their own derivatives for HTML.
This was creating many compatibility problems. Finally,
following the success of the November, 1995 meeting,
the World Wide Web Consortium formed the HTML Editorial
Review Board to help with the standardization process.
This board consisted of representatives from IBM, Microsoft,
Netscape, Novell, Softquad and the W3 Consortium, and
did its business via telephone conference and email
exchanges, meeting approximately once every three months.
Its aim was to collaborate and agree upon a common standard
for HTML, thus putting an end to the era when browsers
each implemented a different subset of the language.
The bad fairy of incompatibility was to be banished
from the HTML kingdom forever, or one could hope so,
perhaps.
The incompatibility was not banished
but was at least minimized. However, HTML kept on growing
and the last versions like the dynamic HTML, like HTML
4.0 brought new colors and usages for this language.
Especially after the edition of style sheets, it became
extremely difficult to standardize the view of a web
page depending on the browser you use.
As you can see, HTML was written for
the pure purpose of information sharing but turned into
a mass communication mechanism. It was supposed to be
an organizational language, and yet became multi-media
source where you can edit the layout and add images,
sound and many other multimedia files. We can blame
the evolution process of this language for the non-standardized
nature of it.
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