Weaving the World Wide Web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 241

Markup language goes hyper

During the twentieth century, typesetting advanced from “hot metal” to “cold type” composition,
with photographic negatives replacing metal type as the source for making printing plates. By the 1960s,
computer-driven phototypesetting machines had become commonplace, and it was against this background
that in 1967, William Tunnicliffe, chairman of the Graphic Communications Association, proposed that a
standard set of editorial markup instructions should be developed that could be inserted into a manuscript
as directions to typesetters for printing. Charles Goldfarb at IBM adapted Tunnicliffe's idea to develop a busi-
ness system that would solve the problems of law firms in creating, editing, and printing documents. With
his colleagues Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie, Goldfarb created the Generalized Markup Language (GML) in
1973. GML was a set of rules and symbols that described a document in terms of its organizational structure
and its content elements and their relationship. GML markups or tags described such parts of a document
as chapters, important sections, paragraphs, lists, tables, and so on. By October 1986, the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) had adopted this language as an international standard called the
Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). (The ISO is an international body that attempts to establish uni-
form sizes and other specifications to ease the exchange of goods between countries.) Berners-Lee wanted to
make his new hypertext scheme as simple as possible but, at the same time, keep the goodwill of the global
documentation community. He therefore deliberately designed HTML to look like a subset of SGML with only
a small set of tags, inserted between angle brackets, as in <word>. Although Berners-Lee never thought that
people would use a browser/editor to actually write web pages, the readability of HTML meant that many
people did start writing their own HTML documents directly.

Emoticons
An emoticon is a pictorial representation of a facial expression that is meant to indicate the user's mood
at the time. The word is a portmanteau word made from the English words emotion and icon . In the online world
emoticons are made up from regular keyboard characters such as :-) and :-( for happy and sad emotions of the
sender. They are now often replaced by small images corresponding to these emotions such as ☺ and ☹ . The
use of emoticons can be traced back to the nineteenth century. The 1857 edition of the National Telegraphic
Review and Operators Guide recorded the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express “love and kisses.”
Digital forms of emoticons were first proposed by Scott Fahlman to distinguish serious posts from
jokes. His email to his colleagues read:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E. Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E. Fahlman<Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence
for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more eco-
nomical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given cur-
rent trends. For this, use
:-(

Fig. 11.29. (a) The computer scientist Scott Fahlman and his smiley
emoticon. (b) The first smiley from 1963.

The actual “smiley face,” with two black dots
for eyes and a black upturned curve for a mouth,
both on a yellow circular background, was created
by the artist Harvey Ball in 1963 ( Fig. 11.29 ).