One such physicist, the now-famous (and knighted) Sir Tim Berners-Lee, cooked up a way to easily cross-reference text on the Internet through hypertext links. It was so hard, in fact, that even Ph.D.-holding physicists were often frustrated when trying to swap data. Until 1990, accessing information through the Internet was a rather technical affair. I’ll spare you the names and stories (there are plenty of both), but the eventual result was the “mother of all networks,” which we call the Internet. Once upon a time, back when there weren’t any footprints on the moon, some farsighted folks decided to see whether they could connect several major computer networks. A Brief History of HTML and the World Wide Web You will be intimately involved in this publishing process because you must create files and then put them on a server to make them available in the first place, and you must ensure that your content will appear to the end user as you intended. Web servers make your content available to others who, in turn, use their web browsers to navigate to an address and wait for the server to send information to them. Tips for testing the appearance and functionality of web contentīefore learning the intricacies of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), it is important to gain a solid understanding of the technologies that help transform these plain-text files to the rich multimedia displays you see on your computer or handheld device when browsing the World Wide Web.įor example, a file containing markup and client-side code HTML and CSS is useless without a web browser to view it, and no one besides yourself will see your content unless a web server is involved.How to use other publishing methods, such as blogs.How to distribute web content without a web server.Where files should be placed on a web server.How to transfer files to your web server using FTP.
How different web browsers and device types can affect your content.How content gets from your personal computer to someone else’s web browser.What is meant by the term web page, and why that term doesn’t always reflect all the content involved.A very brief history of the World Wide Web.