Some HTML markup tells the browser to display an image or video file rather than plain text, which brings me back to the point: Different types of content are sent to your web browser, so simply saying web page doesn’t begin to cover it. Those files contain text that is marked up, or surrounded by, HTML codes that tell the browser how to display the text-as a heading, as a paragraph, in a red font, and so on. Although we talk of “visiting a web page,” what we really mean is something like “looking at all the text and the images at one address on our computer.” The text that we read, and the images that we see, are rendered by our web browsers, which are given certain instructions found in individual files. You might have noticed the use of the term web content rather than web pages-that was intentional. Instead of seeing web content creation and management as a set of skills possessed only by a few technically oriented folks (okay, call them geeks, if you will), by the end of this book, you will see that these are skills that anyone can master, regardless of inherent geekiness.įor more information on the history of the World Wide Web, see the Wikipedia article on this topic. Today’s college students have never known a time in which the World Wide Web didn’t exist, and the idea of always-on information and ubiquitous computing will shape all aspects of our lives moving forward. These few paragraphs really are a brief history of what has been a remarkable period. Those interlinked pages were dubbed the World Wide Web (From that point forward, the continued development of web browser software and the standardization of the HTML-and XHTML-languages has led us to the world we live in today, one in which more than half a billion websites serve billions of text and multimedia files. Hypertext Markup Language is a language for describing how text, graphics, and files containing other information are organized and linked.īy 1993, only 100 or so computers throughout the world were equipped to serve up HTML pages. It is now a broader term that refers to just about any object (text, images, files, and so on) that can be linked to other objects. Hypertext originally meant text stored in electronic form with cross-reference links between pages.

This wasn’t a new idea, but his simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) managed to thrive while more ambitious hypertext projects floundered. One such physicist, the now-famous (and knighted) Sir Tim Berners-Lee, cooked up a way to easily cross-reference text on the Internet through hypertext links. It was so hard, in fact, that even Ph.D.-holding physicists were often frustrated when trying to swap data. Until 1990, accessing information through the Internet was a rather technical affair. I’ll spare you the names and stories (there are plenty of both), but the eventual result was the “mother of all networks,” which we call the Internet. Once upon a time, back when there weren’t any footprints on the moon, some farsighted folks decided to see whether they could connect several major computer networks. A Brief History of HTML and the World Wide Web You will be intimately involved in this publishing process because you must create files and then put them on a server to make them available in the first place, and you must ensure that your content will appear to the end user as you intended. Web servers make your content available to others who, in turn, use their web browsers to navigate to an address and wait for the server to send information to them. Tips for testing the appearance and functionality of web contentīefore learning the intricacies of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), it is important to gain a solid understanding of the technologies that help transform these plain-text files to the rich multimedia displays you see on your computer or handheld device when browsing the World Wide Web.įor example, a file containing markup and client-side code HTML and CSS is useless without a web browser to view it, and no one besides yourself will see your content unless a web server is involved.How to use other publishing methods, such as blogs.How to distribute web content without a web server.Where files should be placed on a web server.

How to transfer files to your web server using FTP.

How different web browsers and device types can affect your content.

How content gets from your personal computer to someone else’s web browser.

What is meant by the term web page, and why that term doesn’t always reflect all the content involved.

A very brief history of the World Wide Web.

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