For the source of the concept, Nelson quotes an essay by Vannevar Bush written in 1945 and read to him by his father as a boy: "The human mind . . . operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain." Expanding this idea from a single human brain to a global mind, Nelson opened the way for the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first Web clients and server and defined the URL, HTTP and HTML specifications in the NeXTSTEP environment at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory which is on the Swiss-French border near Geneva. (The acronym CERN comes from the earlier French title: "Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire") In 1989, he and Robert Cailliau proposed a global networked Hypertext project for High-Energy Physics collaborations to be known as the World Wide Web. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" was made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
In November 1993, using the work made public by Berners-Lee, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released NCSA Mosaic(tm), a software tool that, enabled people to easily browse the thousands of different types of documents proliferating on the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee gave HTML, and the WWW in general, to the world. NCSA took his work and produced Mosaic, which was given away as well. Then in April 1994, Marc Andreessen, creator of NCSA Mosaic, left NCSA to found the Netscape Corporation. Netscape set the stage for Microsoft (and any other commercial entity with similar financial wherewithal and lack of morals) to add to the fragmentation of the WWW by spewing proprietary HTML tags and ignoring the charter of the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), of which Netscape is a founding member. The W3C, its function and charter, will be examined more closely later in this chapter.
The next section looks at what, exactly, HTML is, and is not.
Copyright © 1996 Pris Sears, All Rights Reserved