HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
America Online (AOL)
acquired Netscape in 1998, and the browser's
source code was made public. Eventually, this became the foundation on
which the Mozilla organization built the Firefox browser. Other companies
followed suit, and over the ensuing years, a variety of graphical browsers based
on Netscape came to market. Microsot's
Internet Explorer (IE)
browser
improved with each new version and eventually became the most popular
browser due to its bundling with the Windows operating system.
he browser wars ended with the dotcom crash, and manufacturers began
to bring their browsers into compliance with emerging standards. Under the
W3C's guidance, HTML language development slowed and stabilized on an
HTML4 speciication. he use of CSS was promoted to give Web developers
iner control over typography and page layout over a much wider selection of
devices. HTML attributes and actions (more about these later) were general-
ized. he HTML syntax was modiied slightly to conform to
XML (eXtensible
Markup Language)
, and a transition path was provided to the merging of the
two in the
XHTML
speciication.
he way HTML source code looks has changed. Currently, most websites
are written to the HTML4 and/or XHTML standards, in which valid markup
element and attribute names are written using lowercase letters. By contrast,
a web page written to the HTML3 standard is illed with names written in all
uppercase letters. his convention emerged from early website developers, who
had to write HTML without the beneit of text editors that provided color syn-
tax highlighting. Using uppercase names provided contrast that distinguished
the markup from the content.
More importantly, the ways in which content creators, sotware developers,
and people in general use the Web has evolved dramatically. his change is
encapsulated in the term
Web 2.0
. Although this suggests a new version of the
World Wide Web, it does not refer to any new technical speciications. Instead,
it refers to the changing nature of web pages. he features and functionality
that characterize a Web 2.0 site are a matter of debate. Web 2.0 is better under-
stood as simply a recognition that today's websites do new things with newer
technology than yesterday's websites.
Many of these changes have come about due to the embrace of
open source
as a philosophy of design and development by the tech community. Much
of the sotware that powers the Web is nonproprietary. It is freely available
for people to use, copy, modify, and redistribute as they please. Open-source
development has greatly reduced the cost of sotware development while
increasing its availability, stability, and ease of use. Equally interesting is that
