Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
HTML pages
. HTML is a document formatting language, and it's an abbreviation of
HyperText Markup
Language
. Its goal is to provide a way to structure documents according to a set of tags that indicate
different parts of a document, such as a title or a paragraph. HTML was invented in the late 1980s
by physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at CERN in Switzerland at the time. He wanted to
provide a way for the CERN researchers to easily use and share documents. So, in a memo to his
fellow researchers, he proposed an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified a small
set of tags that an HTML viewer could recognize. The first version of HTML contained 18 of these
tags, and 11 of them are still in modern HTML.
With the Internet becoming publicly accessible, HTML became the common language for building
web sites worldwide. A very popular browser at that time, Mosaic, introduced a new tag,
img
, which
could be used to incorporate an image in an HTML document. In addition, a number of new versions
of the HTML language were drafted by different groups that proposed to standardize certain
elements that were already implemented by a number of browsers, such as tables or fill-out forms.
In 1995, the HTML 2.0 standard was devised by the HTML Working Group, which incorporated
all these elements into a single standard. After that, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was
created to maintain and update the HTML standard over time. A new version of HTML, HTML 3.2,
was defined in January 1997. In December of the same year, the W3C recommended HTML4; and,
finally, HTML4.01 became the newly accepted standard in May 2000. Currently, W3C is finalizing the
fifth version of HTML, HTML5, and chances are it will be the new official HTML standard by the time
you're reading this topic.
Just in case you've never built a web site, this is what a simple HTML page looks like:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Useful website</title>
</head>
<body>
This is a very useful website.
</body>
</html>
Companies that developed browsers soon realized they needed a way to make the pages more
dynamic. The first HTML standard (2.0) was very much directed at marking up text (which was why
HTML was invented in the first place). However, web site users needed buttons and fields, and a
specification was necessary that would indicate what should happen if a user interacted with a
page. In other words, web sites needed to become more dynamic. Of course, there was Java with its
applets, but those applets ran completely independently. There was no way for an applet to modify
elements of an HTML page.
Netscape, the company that developed the Netscape Navigator browser, was in fierce competition
with Microsoft over which browser would become the main one that everybody used. Netscape
used the programming language Java in some of its existing tools, and the company wanted to
design a lightweight, interpreted language that would appeal to nonprofessional programmers
(such as web site designers). This language would be able to interface with a web page and read or
modify its content dynamically. Netscape invented a language called
LiveScript
to fulfill that role. Not
much later, the company changed the name of the script language to
JavaScript
, given its roots in
the Java language and probably because people already recognized the Java name. JavaScript was
included with Netscape Navigator 2.0.
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