HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
rier for most people. And most available information was plain-vanilla
text about academic subjects, not the neatly packaged fare that attracts
users to services such as America Online. The Internet was just too dis-
organized, and, outside of the government and academia, few people
had the knowledge or interest to learn how to use the arcane software
or the time to spend rummaging through documents looking for ones of
interest.
1.1.2. HTML and the Web
It took another spark to light the Internet rocket. At about the same
time the Internet opened up for business, some physicists at CERN,
the European Particle Physics Laboratory, released an authoring lan-
guage and distribution system they developed for creating and sharing
multimedia-enabled, integrated electronic documents over the Internet.
And so was born
Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML), browser software,
and the Web. No longer did authors have to distribute their work
as fragmented collections of pictures, sounds, and text. HTML unified
those elements. Moreover, the Web's systems enabled
hypertext link-
ing
, whereby documents automatically reference other documents loc-
ated anywhere around the world: less rummaging, more productive
time online.
Lift-off happened when some bright students and faculty at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign wrote a web browser called Mosaic. Al-
though designed primarily for viewing HTML documents, the software
also had built-in tools to access the much more prolific resources on the
Internet, such as FTP archives of software and Gopher-organized collec-
tions of documents.
With versions based on easy-to-use GUIs familiar to most computer
owners, Mosaic became an instant success. It, like most Internet soft-
ware, was available on the Net for free. Millions of users snatched up
copies and began surfing the Internet for "cool web pages."
