The World Wide Web

The history of the WWW starts back in 1945, when a man named Vannevar Bush wrote a brief article in the Atlantic Monthly about a "photo-electrical-mechanical device called a Memex, for memory extension, which could make and follow links between documents on microfiche."[1] This marked the first documented push towards the idea of a digital shared space linked together. The WWW allowed for the pictures and sound to be displayed and exchanged. The man responsible for these shenanigans is Tim Berners Lee. The first go at this project were at the CERN Laboratories in December of 1990. "By 1991 browser and web software was available, and by 1992 a few preliminary sites exsisted in places like Univ of Illinois. By the end of 1992, there were about 26 sites."[2] In April of 1993, CERN made a decision that the WWW technology would be freely usable by anyone, with no charges to CERN. By 1994 there were a million browser copies in use and by 1998 these were 750,000 commercial sites on the World Wide Web, forever changing the face of big business.[1]

"In '93 to '94, every browser had its own flavor of HTML. So it was very difficult to know what you could put in a Web page and reliably have most of your readership see it."[6]
-Tim Berners Lee



Load on the first Web server (info.cern.ch) 1000 times what it had been three years earlier, June '94. [1]

The Internet

"The Internet is at once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard for geographic location."[3] J.C.R. Licklider, then a professor at MIT, proposed in 1962 a global network of computers, then only an idea to share scientific and military information, a far stone's throw from the "everything" the internet covers today.[4] The first of this propsed success came when another egg-head at MIT connected a Massachusetts computer to a California computer over phone lines. This breakthrough also immediately showed the weakness of relying on telephone poles for thsi type of information sharing. That dude Roberts I was talking about left MIT to start what would become ARPANET, which was what the Internet was know as then. It was funded by four major universities in the southwest US: UCLA, Stanford, UCSB and Univ of Utah.[4]

An Internet Timeline [3]

It's a pretty funny story when it comes to who was the first person to use the Internet. According to this source, a UCLA campus-man by the name of Charley Kline sent the first packets on ARPANet as he was trying to connect to Stanford Research Institute back on October 29th, 1969. Story goes the system crashed as he reached the G in LOGIN.[4] Also, it important to note that Al Gore did not invent the Internet, but was actually one of the first politicians to take such an interest in the program and help get it to where it is today. He did soooomething people.

WC3: Standards

I'll start off with something from the horse's mouth, defined as only W3.org can. "W3C standards define an Open Web Platform for application development that has the unprecedented potential to enable developers to build rich interactive experiences, powered by vast data stores, that are available on any device. Although the boundaries of the platform continue to evolve, industry leaders speak nearly in unison about how HTML5 will be the cornerstone for this platform. But the full strength of the platform relies on many more technologies that W3C and its partners are creating, including CSS, SVG, WOFF, the Semantic Web stack, XML, and a variety of APIs."[5] When the Internet started to be tinkered with by everyday programmers, adding their own little touches as they saw fit. The Internet was then in danger of becoming a total mess reflecting everyone's and thus no one's views and specifications. Which is why a standard needed to be created for all web browsers to operate from to keep the Internet tamed to a useful degree. This is where our hero from earlier Tim Berners Lee came in. He formed the W3C (which stands for the World Wide Web Consortium) to keep all this who-ha at bay. In a nutshell, the W3C revolves around a certain standardization of Web Technologies. What's suuuper cool about the W3C right now, and it's probably been like this for awhile, but I'm a little new to this, but they have a place on online (here actually!) where one can upload their code, in a few different ways and the W3C generator can specify exact lines that have problems, ie, are not congruent with W3C standardization. That said, it isn't always super important what "will validate" and what "just fucking works" is often a larger gap that one would think. There are so many different browser specifications out there for each borswer fighting for room in the webspace that it's impossible to get everything right. So it's cool to intro to scripting to get some green when a code totally validates, but as you get farther in you learb different rules to break. Up yours Tim!

The WHATWG

The WHATWG stands for the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. Say that beast three times fast! I did and it didn't end well. We'll miss you Auntie Joan... Anyway! "WHATWG is a "loose unofficial collaboration of Web browser manufacturers and interested parties who wish to develop new technologies designed to allow authors to write and deploy Applications over the World Wide Web." Two terms are of particular interest here: WHATWG's main players make browsers (Mozilla, Opera), and the focus of their improvements is towards creating Web applications."[8] The WHATWG was created in response to the HTML Working Group, which is the group within the W3C responsible for creating/managing the HTML standard. Well, right after 1999, when HTML 4.01 was released, these cats announced they would pursue an XML version of HTML, called XHTML 2.0.[7] Other cool cats, namely web-browsing giants Mozilla and Opera were unhappy with this direction and moved to create the WHATWG, which looks to hone the capabilities of HTML sans XML. Skip a few pages forward and we see now that Apple has joined in the WHATWG and viola! HTML5 is born. Gotta love it. Moreover, it came to be that the W3C's HTMLWG realized that XHTML 2.0 was more or less impractical and ceased work, making a move towards focusing it's efforts on the WHATWG's HTML5. Here are some features I found online detailing exactly why HTML5 is the total shit: "New layout elements, including a calendar control, an address card, a flexible datagrid, gauges and progress meters, drag and drop, and menus," "Programming extensions to the Document Object Model (DOM), including server-sent DOM events" "A formalization of the de-facto standard XMLHttpRequest object, the centerpiece of Ajax communication" "Dynamic bitmap graphics through the canvas element."[8] Boo-ya son!

Markup Languages

A markup language is simply the language a code is written in. All different markup languages have a different way of functioning and displaying what they are meant to display, and depending on who you talk to, that particular one might just be the best one out there. Hmmm, someone can say that better than me. How about this? "A markup language is a language that annotates text so that the computer can manipulate the text. Most markup languages are human readable because the annotations are written in a way to distinguish them from the text. For example, with HTML, XML, and XHTML, the markup tags are < and >. Any text that appears within one of those characters is considered part of the markup language and not part of the annotated text."[10] Markup languages got their start way back in the hippie-sixties when three IBM nerds created GML.[9] This stood for Generalized Markup Language and was a simple formatting language for document publishing. Soon evolving into the SGML, (Standard Generalized Markup Language) this markup language was mostly an standard by the late 80s, the dawn of true Internet using. Then, when the situation seemed at its bleakest, who but to swoop in and save the day but the people's hero Tim Berners Lee! Around 1990, when the World Wide Web came around Lee developed HTML as a subset of SGML. This stood for Hypertext Transfer Protocol.[9]

Footnotes!