HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is one of the main mechanisms that allowed the explosion of the WWW (World Wide Web, or, the Web). It was intended to be device independent, which means HTML documents should be viewable by any internet connected computer with any HTML aware Web browser. HTML is not a programming language, it is a mark-up language, based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). SGML was chosen as a base because it is device independent, well documented, and the specifications are freely available in the public domain.
The first HTML specification and browser was produced and given away for free to the general public in the summer of 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee while he was at CERN. Additions to HTML were debated, tested, and finalized as HTML 1.0 in March 1993. In November 1993, NCSA produced and distributed Mosaic, the first free Web browser, which complied with the HTML 1.0 specs.
In April 1994, a new commercial entity, Netscape Corporation, was created by Dr. James H. Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Inc., a Fortune 500 computer systems company; and Marc Andreessen, creator of the NCSA Mosaic research prototype for the Internet.
Netscape began expanding the HTML specifications by adding new tags without going through the established channels of proposal, comment, and finalization that would normally accompany changes in HTML. These tags include tables and frames.
As a commercial entity, Netscape has an interest in capturing as much of the Web browser market as possible. The "Netscape-isms" are attractive to some authors, but are detrimental to the Web in that users without GUI (Graphical User Interface) operating systems and/or a Netscape browser (or even users with an older copy of Netscape) are unable to access information presented using tags that are not finalized in a specification. Also, disabled users that depend on HTML-to-speech or HTML-to-braille must have standard HTML to be interpreted correctly.
The success of Netscape has attracted the attention of Microsoft, which has added its own non-spec HTML tags to the arena, such as MARQUEE.
Individual HTML authors have to know what tags are globally usable, and make careful decisions on how use of non-spec tags will affect users. This may become even more critical in the future, as less developed countries join the Internet community. The most plentiful inexpensive computers are likely to be older, text-only machines. Use of non-standard HTML cuts out disabled users, and anyone using text-only Web browsers.
In the next section, we will look at the origins of HTML.
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