HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1. HTML, XHTML, and the World Wide Web
Though it began as a military experiment and spent its adolescence as a
sandbox for academics and eccentrics, in less than a decade just before
the new millennium, the worldwide network of computer networks (a.k.a.
the
Internet
) matured into a highly diversified, financially important com-
munity of computer users and information vendors. From the boardroom
to your living room, you can bump into Internet users of nearly any and
all nationalities, of any and all persuasions, from serious to frivolous indi-
viduals, from businesses to nonprofit organizations, and from born-again
Christian evangelists to pornographers.
In many ways, the
Web
the open community of hypertext-enabled docu-
ment servers and readers on the Internetis responsible for the meteoric
rise in the network's popularity. You, too, can become a valued member
by contributing: writing HTML and XHTML documents and then making
them available to web surfers worldwide.
Let's climb up the Internet family tree to gain some deeper insight into
its magnificence, not only as an exercise of curiosity, but also to help us
better understand just who and what we are dealing with when we go
online.
