Datasheet

Crowder c01.tex V3 - 05/26/2008 7:16pm Page 4
Part I Laying the Foundation
deliver services. A better understanding of how to structure the delivery method allows more
effective delivery of the content itself. This chapter discusses the structure of a Web page using
HTML to help you understand what coding a Web page is like.
Web Browsers
In the last few decades of the last century of the last millennium, small groups of men and
women of genius and vision working at European and American research and academic locales
developed the technologies that would result in the radical growth of the Internet worldwide.
Although the development and growth of the Internet will be covered in some detail in Chapter 3,
a bit of the background of the Internet is provided here in the context of the development of the
Web browser.
The Web browser is a technological tool that allows access to networked Web pages. You may
think that all the knowledge of the world lies just a few finger strokes away, but a good portion of
all the Web pages created are inaccessible because of restrictions on their access. By one estimate,
only 20 percent of all Web pages are freely accessed via the Internet. In short, a Web browser is
a software application used to locate and display Web pages. Not all of these pages are on the
Internet. Most corporations have extensive intranets with their own Web pages created and/or
maintained by employees and departments.
The earliest graphical user interface (GUI) Web browser (actually called WorldWideWeb)was
developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 at Organisation europ
´
eenne pour la recherche nucl
´
eaire
(CERN). The World Wide Web was so named by Berners-Lee after a lunchtime discussion with
another CERN colleague, Robert Cailliau, who was a systems engineer and a strong proponent of
a hypertext transfer program.
CERN was established in 1954 as an initial consortium of 11 European nations, to
do fundamental research in physics. Today, about half of the fundamental research
experiments are conducted at CERN. Its association with the Internet arose because, one of its
researchers, Berners-Lee, sought (and created) a way to access hypertext documents on other sites.
This discovery led him to create the first Web browser. Almost by default, he became creator of
the first Web server. He also managed to create the protocol by which Web page content is sent
across the Web (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP). Of course, he also unavoidably created
the first version of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
A graphical user interface (GUI) is icon-driven. Prior to GUIs, users would use a
text-based process to gain access to their desired files, folders, and Web locations by
typing in the destination. Today, we still have text-based Web browsers such as Lynx. An advantage
of text-based browsers is that they allow much faster loading of Web page content over slow
connections.
Berners-Lee also developed an addressing scheme (described later in this chapter) so that Web
content could be reached, retrieved, and rendered. This first Web browser ran on a NeXT com-
puter platform. The content of this first browser, WorldWideWeb, was rendered in grayscale
and, because the art of placing images inline had not yet been mastered, images and icons were
4