Background/History of World Wide Web
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The World Wide Web (known as "Web," "WWW' or "W3") is the universe
of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human
knowledge -- of course, in form of a smorgasbord that
contains different shades of quality and quantity.
The World Wide Web began as a networked information project in
1990 at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) by Tim
Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The WWW transfer protocol is called HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer
Protocol) and HTTP can understand the transfer protocol format
written HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).
HTML has been popularized by the Mosaic browser (now Netscape)
developed at NCSA. During the course of the 1990s it has
blossomed with the explosive growth of the Web.
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Mechanism of Web - HTTP and HTML
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The Web relies on three mechanisms to make these resources readily
available to the widest possible audience:
- A uniform naming scheme for locating resources on the Web (e.g., URIs).
- Protocols, for access to named resources over the Web (e.g., HTTP).
- Hypertext, for easy navigation among resources (e.g., HTML).
Universal Resource Identifier (URI) is an
encoding syntax/address for every resource available on the Web --
HTML document, image, sound, video clip, news, program, file, etc.
you name it -- as long as it is accessible via network. Sometimes, people use
different expressions, namely Universal Resource Locator (URL) instead of URI.
However, URI is much broader in terms of overall context, and URI should be used
over URL whenever necessary. Most common example is a website address
such as http://cee.odu.edu.
URI can contain various network connection
methods including FTP, Telnet, Usenet, E-Mail, Gopher, WAIS, nntp, etc.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a
network protocol (i.e., protocol is a kind of 'Esperanto' among
heterogeneous/homogeneous computers) running over a number of other
network protocols such as;
TCP (Transfer Control Protocol -- Host-to-Host connection-oriented);
UDP (User Datagram Protocol -- Host-to-Host, packet-oriented);
IP (Internet Protocol -- datagram service for TCP hosts);
ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol -- error message & routing);
ARP (Address Resolution Protocol -- figuring out IP address); and
RARP (Reverse Address Resolution Protocol).
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is a
the publishing language used by the World Wide Web. To publish
information for global distribution when distribution/connection
mechanism is established via HTTP, one needs a universally
understood language, a kind of publishing mother tongue that
all computers may potentially understand. HTML gives authors the means to:
- Publish online documents with headings, text, tables, lists, photos, etc.
- Retrieve online information via hypertext links, at the click of a button.
- Design forms for conducting transactions with remote services, for
use in searching for information, making reservations, ordering
products, etc.
- Include spreadsheets, video clips, sound clips, and other
applications directly in their documents.
HTML is based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language),
and SGML is an official International Standard (ISO/IEC 8879:1986)
language for the specification of structural markup
for the electronic interchange of information that has been
adopted by the European Community, the governments of the US
and Canada, the aerospace, automotive, semiconductor, defense
and other industries.
"Tag" used in HTML has its root from Document Type Definitions
(DTDs) tags in SGML.
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Progression of HTML
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HTML 2.0 (November 1995/RFC1866]) was developed by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) to codify common practice in late 1994.
HTML+ (1993) and HTML 3.0 (1995) proposed much richer versions
of HTML. Despite never receiving consensus in standards
discussions, these drafts led to the adoption of a range of
new features. The efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium's
HTML Working Group to codify common practice in 1996 resulted
in HTML 3.2 (January 1997).
HTML 4.0 (1997) extends HTML with mechanisms for style sheets,
internationalization, scripting, frames, embedding objects,
improved support for right to left and mixed direction text,
richer tables, and enhancements to forms, offering improved
accessibility for people with disabilities. As a result,
HTML 4.0 becomes a de facto standard for HTML
authoring nowadays.
Of course, you can still insist
on using HTML 3.2 standard, however HTML 4.0 has much
richer features and more flexibility than 3.2, and I strongly
suggest you to stick with HTML 4.0 if this is your first
time making an acquaintance with HTML.
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