Java Reference
In-Depth Information
a competitive position, Netscape needed to offer new features to make the user want to purchase its
browser rather than use the free Microsoft browser.
Things came to a head with both companies' version 4 browsers, which introduced dynamic page
functionality. Unfortunately, Netscape did this by the means of a
<layer />
element, whereas
Microsoft chose to implement it via scripting language properties and methods. The W3C needed
to take a firm stand here, because one of its three principal aims had been compromised: that of
universal access. How could access be universal if users needed a specific vendor's browser to view
a particular set of pages? They decided on a solution that used existing standard HTML elements
and cascading style sheets, both of which had been adopted as part of the Microsoft solution. As a
result, Microsoft gained a dominant position in the browser war, and it held that position for many
years. Today, Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, but it has lost a lot of its
market share to Chrome and Firefox.
With a relatively stable version of the HTML standard in place with version 4.01, which boasts a set
of features that will take any browser manufacturer a long time to implement completely, attention
was turned to other areas of the web. A new set of standards was introduced in the late 1990s to
govern the means of presenting HTML (style sheets) and the representation of the HTML document
in script (the DOM). Other standards emerged, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), which
offers a common format for representing data in a way that preserves its structure.
Not all of these standards concern us, and not all of the ones that concern us can be found at this
website. However, the vast majority of standards that do concern us can be found there.
You're going to take a brief look now at the technologies and standards that have an impact on
JavaScript and find out a little background information about each. Some of the technologies may be
unfamiliar, but you need to be aware of their existence at the very least.
html
The HTML standard is maintained by W3C. This standard might seem fairly straightforward,
given that each version should have introduced just a few new elements, but in reality the life of the
standards body was vastly complicated by the browser wars. The 1.0 and 2.0 versions of HTML
were simple, small documents, but when the W3C came to debate HTML version 3.0, they found
that much of the new functionality it was discussing had already been superseded by new additions
(such as the
<applet />
and
<style />
elements) to the version 3.0 browser's
appletstyle
. Version
3.0 was discarded, and a new version, 3.2, became the standard.
However, a lot of the features that went into HTML 3.2 had been introduced at the behest of the
browser manufacturers and ran contrary to the spirit of HTML, which was intended solely to define
structure. The new features, stemming from the
<font />
element, just confused the issue and
added unnecessary presentational features to HTML. These features really became redundant with
the introduction of style sheets. So suddenly, in the version 3 browsers, there were three distinct
ways to define the style of an item of text. Which was the correct way? And if all three ways were
used, which style did the text ultimately assume? Version 4.0 of the HTML standard was left with
the job of unmuddling this chaotic mess and designated a lot of elements for deprecation (removal)
in the next version of the standards. It was the largest version of the standard so far and included
