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HTML: What It Is! First Words Hello. I'm Rob Stevenson, in case you completely ignored the header above. (For shame! We'll all just wait while you go back and read it.) I now call myself a web manager and consultant, though I've been many other things in the past, including a conservator of historic objects, a furniture designer/builder, a database developer and user interface designer. Until recently I wrote the Simply Stated column at MacOS daily, where I could pontificate on almost anything that crossed my mind. What fun I had! But my MacOS daily column was a general purpose column which meant I couldn't go into too much detail about my favourite subject of all, the web. So in this new Mac OS Journal column I'll be satisfying both my urge to talk about the web as well as, I hope, your urge to learn about it. I interpret that mandate fairly loosely. At times I'll get down into some of the messy technical details, the nitty and the gritty of how the web works, but always in support of a broader point. At other times I may offer opinions, compare applications (but I don't do full reviews), or generally comment on the web and its influence on our work and home lives. I see my audience as being people who surf the web and want to know more about how it works, as well as people who want or need a web site and want to know how that works too. But if you're a web developer/master/manager already, you'll probably get more out of the advanced HTML column in this issue of Mac OS Journal. It has the deep, dark details and the secret recipes that you need to help you make the best site ever. I refer to that column myself from time to time. I find it easiest to write about what I'm actually doing at the time (write what you know, said somebody famous) so for example you may soon get some background information about setting up an eCommerce site, a process I'm beginning as we speak. Whatever I get into here I hope it's never dull. Let me or my editor know if it is! This column is intended to be a series of mini-seminars, connected to each other in a linear fashion. So as time goes on I'll be able to link you back to an earlier column for an in-depth explanation of something I'm referring to in the current column. That saves a lot of repetition. Eventually it'll become a valuable resource, a kind of on-line book about the web. Next month's column will get us going by defining a whole lot of terms that we'll need later on. It'll be the Glossary for the series. Don't worry, I'll try to keep that from being as boring as it sounds. Even a glossary definition can be light-hearted, or can include unexpected detail, anecdotes or historical tidbits. And now, let's start at the beginning, with a mini-history of the web...
History In the beginning there was the 'net, and it was good. But not quite good enough. Seems people wanted to be able to place documents in files here and there on servers and view those documents online and interactively without having to download them or own the application that created them. A document viewer was needed, and a standard way to create documents so the viewer could read them was also a necessity. In particular, a way of linking between documents was a long-sought holy grail. The Internet was already in use as a means of communication, mainly between universities and research labs across the world. But it lacked that next essential element, a document browser tool. All this was known in 1989 when a gentleman named Tim Berners-Lee (working at CERN, a Swiss research lab) first proposed what we've come to know as the World Wide Web. He wisely chose that name over some other possibilities he considered: Information Mesh, Mine of Information, and Information Mine. They just don't seem to have the right ring, do they? Berners-Lee began work in 1990 on the first prototype of what we now call web servers and browsers, using one of Steve Jobs' NeXT computers. He set up a server within CERN, wrote a graphical browser using the NeXTSTEP development tools and demonstrated it to all who would sit still long enough. The idea was well received. By January of 1991 the first HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) servers outside of CERN were set up. By January of '93 there were 50 such servers, 500 by October and 1500 by the following June. The first publicly available graphical browser, Mosaic, was released by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in September of 1993. On April 30th that year CERN's directors issued a milestone document in which they declared that WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no fees being payable to CERN. The W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, keepers of the standards on which the web rests, was formed in July of '94. All the key elements were in place -- the amazing growth of the web could now start. The web's universality depends on a single definition of a language. I'll cover this in more detail in later columns, but for now it's enough to know that all programs that display information need to store both the information to be displayed and information about how to display it. This how-to-display data can be called markup. The description of how to codify this markup is a language definition. (You can see the web's language at work by choosing View Source from one of your browser's menus right now.) If you use WordPerfect you can switch to a view of your document which shows the tags that define where paragraphs begin and end, what words are bold, and so on. That's WP's markup language made visible. The web uses something similar, and the definition of that markup language is maintained by the good folks at the World Wide Web Consortium. The language is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML has gone through several versions as the needs of web users have changed, and now stands at v4.1 -- I'll have much more to say about this subject in a later column. Web browsers -- i.e., Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape's Navigator, iCab, Opera and many others -- the tools we use to view the web have also changed - sometimes to keep up with changes in the language definition, sometimes adding features that weren't yet in the definition, sometimes just making a mess of things for competitive purposes. This tug of war between browser manufacturers and standards has in part driven the success of the web, while also being a major pain for web users and developers alike. And the tussle continues to this day, with all recent browsers trumpeting how standards-compliant they are, while still containing literally hundreds of bugs which prevent them from correctly displaying some standards-compliant code. No. I'm not exaggerating for effect. Have a look at Building Around Browser Bugs or click the Bugs link at RichInStyle. I've touched lightly above on several topics that will get a complete workout in later columns, in particular ways of working within the language and browser restrictions to both create the web and surf it satisfactorily. For that is what this column is about: using the web, whether you think the web might help your business or you're just trying to surf the web. Of course this has been a massively compressed version of web history. But I hate to duplicate work others have already done well, so here are a few good history links to satisfy your craving for the full story: Tim
Berners-Lee
It's a Wrap Well, we've raced through history to get up to this point. But what's it all mean? How does it work? What does my browser do to make all these documents appear? What's gone wrong when they don't appear? How do I make my own documents available on the web? Will this guy ever stop asking rhetorical questions? Tune in next month as we continue our exploration of all things web.
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