When you are surfing through the web you generally
see some pages that are not displayed properly, the frames
become all mixed up and the content become unreadable. Many
surfers think that it is a problem of coding and the blame
incompetent coders. Actually, if you feel better placing
blame, it belongs with the greedy program distributors like
Microsoft and Sun Systems which turned the great educational
idea of Tim Berners-Lee into a competition area and a complex
language not having a standard form.
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. In 1989, Tim
was working in a computing services section of CERN when
he came up with the concept (web); at the time he had no
idea that it would be implemented on such an enormous scale.
Particle physics research often involves collaboration among
institutes from all over the world. Tim had the idea of
enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to organize
and pool together information. But far from simply making
available a large number of research documents as files
that could be downloaded to individual computers; he suggested
that you could actually link the text in the files themselves.
In other words, there could be cross-references from one
research paper to another. This would mean that while reading
one research paper, you could quickly display part of another
paper that holds directly relevant text or diagrams. Documentation
of a scientific and mathematical nature would thus be represented
as a ‘web’ of information held in electronic
form on computers across the world. This, Tim thought, could
be done by using some form of hypertext, some way of linking
documents together by using buttons on the screen, which
you simply clicked on to jump from one paper to another.
Tim’s simple but effective idea turned out to be
the greatest communication device of humanity even if it
was not supported by big companies and manufacturers. For
instance, Hewlett-Packard, in common with many other large
computer companies, was quite unconvinced that the Internet
would be a success; indeed, the need for a global hypertext
system simply passed them by. For many large corporations,
the question of whether or not any money could be made from
the Web was unclear from the outset.
Later, especially after Mosaic, the first web browser was
released; the competition between the companies became more
obvious. The later version of Mosaic in competition with
the Microsoft Internet Explorer added new features to the
HTML language like n-compass and active-x controls respectively.
Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium was formed to fulfill
the potential of the Web through the development of open
standards. They had a strong interest in HTML. Just as an
orchestra insisting on the best musicians, the consortium
recruited many of the best-known names in the Web community
headed up by Tim Berners-Lee. During 1995, all kinds of
new HTML tags emerged. Some, like the BGCOLOR attribute
of the BODY element and FONT FACE, which control stylistic
aspects of a document, found themselves in the black books
of the academic engineering community. “You're not
supposed to be able to do things like that in HTML,”
they would protest. In the end, the technology of web was
for the pure purpose of science and technology. It was not
supposed to turn into a multimedia “tool”. It
was their belief that such things as text color, background
texture, font size and font face were definitely outside
the scope of a language when their only intent was to specify
how a document would be organized.
While the W3 Consortium was working on already the HTML
3, the web design was benefiting the competition between
the Netscape and IE. Even for the good intentions of the
consortium, the big corporations insisted on creating their
own derivatives for HTML. This was creating many compatibility
problems. Finally, following the success of the November,
1995 meeting, the World Wide Web Consortium formed the HTML
Editorial Review Board to help with the standardization
process. This board consisted of representatives from IBM,
Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, Softquad and the W3 Consortium,
and did its business via telephone conference and email
exchanges, meeting approximately once every three months.
Its aim was to collaborate and agree upon a common standard
for HTML, thus putting an end to the era when browsers each
implemented a different subset of the language. The bad
fairy of incompatibility was to be banished from the HTML
kingdom forever, or one could hope so, perhaps.
The incompatibility was not banished but was at least minimized.
However, HTML kept on growing and the last versions like
the dynamic HTML, like HTML 4.0 brought new colors and usages
for this language. Especially after the edition of style
sheets, it became extremely difficult to standardize the
view of a web page depending on the browser you use.
As you can see, HTML was written for the pure purpose of
information sharing but turned into a mass communication
mechanism. It was supposed to be an organizational language,
and yet became multi-media source where you can edit the
layout and add images, sound and many other multimedia files.
We can blame the evolution process of this language for
the non-standardized nature of it.
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