Java Reference
In-Depth Information
the Web standards
When Tim Berners‐Lee created HTML in 1991, he probably had little idea that this technology for
marking up scientific papers via a set of tags for his own global hypertext project, known as the
World Wide Web, would, within a matter of years, become a battleground between the two giants
of the software business of the mid‐1990s. HTML was a simple derivation from the meta‐language
Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that had been kicking around academic
institutions for decades. Its purpose was to preserve the structure of the documents created with it.
HTML depends on a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to transmit documents back
and forth between the resource and the viewer (for example, the server and the client computer).
These two technologies formed the foundation of the web, and it quickly became obvious in the
early 1990s that there needed to be some sort of policing of both specifications to ensure a common
implementation of HTML and HTTP so that communications could be conducted worldwide.
In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a body that set out to oversee the
technical evolution of the web. It has three main aims:
➤
To provide universal access, so that anybody can use the web
➤
To develop a software environment to allow users to make use of the web
➤
To guide the development of the web, taking into consideration the legal, social, and
commercial issues that arise
Each new version of a specification of a web technology has to be carefully vetted by W3C before
it can become a standard. The HTML and HTTP specifications are subject to this process, and
each new set of updates to these specifications yields a new version of the standard. Each standard
has to go through a working draft, a candidate recommendation, and a proposed recommendation
stage before it can be considered a fully operational standard. At each stage of the process, members
of the W3C consortium vote on which amendments to make, or even on whether to cancel the
standard completely and send it back to square one.
It sounds like a very painful and laborious method of creating a standard format, and not
something you'd think of as spearheading the cutting edge of technical revolution. Indeed, the
software companies of the mid‐1990s found the processes involved too slow, so they set the tone
by implementing new innovations themselves and then submitting them to the standards body
for approval. Netscape started by introducing new elements in its browser, such as the
<font />
element, to add presentational content to the web pages. This proved popular, so Netscape added
a whole raft of elements that enabled users to alter aspects of presentation and style on web pages.
Indeed, JavaScript itself was such an innovation from Netscape.
When Microsoft entered the fray, it was playing catch up for the first two iterations of its Internet
Explorer browser. However, with Internet Explorer 3 in 1996, Microsoft established a roughly
equal set of features to compete with Netscape and so was able to add its own browser‐specific
elements. Very quickly, the web polarized between these two browsers, and pages viewable on one
browser quite often wouldn't work on another. One problem was that Microsoft had used its much
stronger position in the market to give away its browser for free, whereas Netscape still needed to
sell its own browser because it couldn't afford to freely distribute its flagship product. To maintain
