hypermedia, search, search engines, Tim Berners-Lee, markup language, hypertext, tags, CSS, DNS, Domain Name System, URL
HTML stands for hypertext markup language and is a set of formatting instructions which allows a text file to have special formats which allows hyperlinks and access to web pages. HTML is not a programming language. It is only a set of instructions to format text.
There are so many tutorials on HTML that at this stage I don't see any reason for creating new ones. Check out the links in the coloured box called More
The World Wide Web began life in CERN laboritories, Switzerland. The CERN laboritories concern themselves with physics and highly abstract ideas. Very different to the online shopping and information highway which we are used to today.
The web was the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee. In 1989, Tim was working in computing at CERN when he came up with the idea; nobody could have guessed what it would become. Physics and academic researchers sometimes like to collaborate on projects. Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of creating networks of computers to enable this to happen. More than just sharing if he was able to link the documents so that a person did not need to look for them it would be much easier again.
By doing this there would be cross references between one paper and another. Thus documentation would form a `web' of information across the world. Before coming to CERN, Tim had already worked on document production and text processing, and had developed his first hypertext system, `Enquire', in 1980 for his own personal use.
Tim's prototype Web browser on the NeXT computer came out in 1990.
It was no coincidence that the web was invented in the early 1990s. New developments in technology made it easier to communicate between computers and it was only a matter of time before someone invented the web. Similar developments to HTML were already happening and the internet was gaining in users all the time. Lastly the new domain name system made it easier for non technical people to address another computer on the internet.
In the late 1980s, Bill Atkinson, came up with an application called Hypercard for the Macintosh. Hypercard was similar to PowerPoint enabled the user to create a series of on-screen `filing cards' that contained textual and graphical information.
Hypercard set the scene for more applications based on the filing card idea. Toolbook for the PC was used in the early 1990s for constructing hypertext training courses that had `pages' with buttons which could go forward or backward or jump to a new topic. Behind the scenes, buttons would initiate little programs called scripts.
Hypercard had one major limitation: hypertext jumps could only be made to files on the same computer. Jumps made to computers on the other side of the world were still out of the question. Nobody yet had implemented a system involving hypertext links on a global scale.
Once the domain name system came into being the concept of addressing information to another computer became much easier and the groundwork was ready for what is now known as the internet.
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