Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
ent documents that one could read, each document that referenced another re-
search paper could have a hyper link to the other document, so that the reader could
navigate from one document to the next with ease, and in a timely manner.
In order to implement his idea of hyperlinking documents together, Tim Berners-
Lee looked to an existing markup language as the basis for his own markup lan-
guage—
Standard Generalized Markup Language
or
SGML
for short—as a start-
ing point. SGML was a simple language designed to structure text by using a tag
vocabulary. For example, in order to specify that a block of text was to be interpreted
as a paragraph, one would surround such text with a pair of "paragraph tags", which
looked the same as today's paragraph tags in HTML. While the basic vocabulary in
Tim's version of the language remained the same, one key tag was added—the hy-
perlink tag. Thus, HTML was born.
Keep in mind that Tim's vision for the language was very specific. Through HTML's
ability to cross-reference documents together, published scientific research papers
could be much more efficiently studied. It was not until many years later that HTML
started being used for other purposes beyond sharing of interlinked text.
The evolution of the World Wide Web
As the computer became more common place and more people started to own their
own machine, and as the Internet became more widely used, people started finding
new ways to use the new technology. Instead of using the Web simply to read what
others had written, people began to use it to talk to people by writing and publishing
documents. It wasn't long after that until the Internet became a giant virtual society.
The Internet continued to grow in popularity through the 1990s, and different uses for
it continue to emerge. With each new idea of how that amazing infrastructure could
be used, new ways had to be thought of in order to bring those ideas into reality,
since the technology that supported the Internet was still the same. At its core, a
web application was still nothing more than a text-based document, formatted using
HTML. In order to add some logic to this otherwise static data, programmers used
programs stored in the web server to manipulate input from the user, and create
HTML documents dynamically. Again, the actual documents that users interacted
with as they navigated the Internet, were nothing more than pure HTML.
