World Wide Web Training

A Short History of the World Wide Web

The term "hypertext" was first used in 1965 by Ted Nelson in his book "Literary Machines," to mean automated crossreferences between documents to overcome the limitations (linearity) of traditional texts. The first implementation was developed in 1967 at Brown University by a team led by Doctor Andries van Dam. It was called Hypertext Editing System. This system was used in 1968 for the Apollo space program documentation.

In 1978 Andrew Lippman of MIT led a team to develop the first true hypermedia system called the Aspen Movie Map. This new technology demonstrated the ability to use images and navigate to a particular location on a map.

In 1980, unhappy with his day planner, Tim Berners-Lee began a network information project at a large company between France and Switzerland called CERN. Tim was trying to keep track of who worked on which project, the software being used, and which software ran on which platform. His first hypertext system was called Esquire.

In 1984 the Internet and TCP/IP was introduced at CERN. By 1989 CERN had become the largest Internet site in Europe.

In 1990, Berners-Lee began a 2 phase project. The first phase, CERN would make use of existing software and hardware and implement a simple browser. In the second phase, they would extend the application by allowing users to add new material. The project was named World Wide Web.

The Web has a body of software and a set of protocols and conventions. The protocol used for communication between the clients and the server is Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The language used to compose web documents is HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The naming convention used to address a resource on the Internet is Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

One of the first browsers created was developed in 1993 by a team led by Marc Andreessen called "Mosaic for X". This product eventually became known as Netscape.

Javascript

In 1995 a powerful addition to HTML called Javascript was added to the Mosaic browser by Netscape programmer Brendan Eich. Javascript gives web developers the ability to access the Document Object Model - the internal components of the web page - directly from a web page. This provides the ability to create dynamic web pages.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

The W3C standards organization invented Cascading Style Sheets to give web developers a more standard (and more powerful) way to control the formatting and appearance of web pages, separately from the content. The CSS-1 standard was not fully adopted by most browsers until around 2001. CSS is used heavily today on the Internet, and is very important to understand if you want to create the best web sites.

The Web Today

Today, there are many browsers available to users. Examples include Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla Firefox. All of these support HTML, Javascript and CSS technologies.

If you would like to develop your own powerful web pages, you should learn HTML, CSS and Javascript. We suggest that you eventually add PHP and MySQL to your repertoire.

Why Should You Learn HTML?

Many web developers think they are being productive by using a GUI page layout application. They don't realize that they are dramatically limiting their ability to produce truely powerful, dynamic web pages. The best features cannot be found in GUI web dev applications - they only suggest limited "choices" of elements you can use on your web pages. All features are available to you when you develop at the HTML, CSS, and Javascript levels. Your productivity then comes from doing file-includes and writing function libraries to eliminate redundancy and cut-n-paste syndrome. This is only possible in higher level languages such as PHP.

Most HTML and Web training courses are 5 days long. Fastech Learning Center will enable you to create powerful web pages in just 3 days. Our hands-on, instructor led, high tech industry tested web training will give you the skills you need to build dynamic web pages in just a few days and for a reasonable cost. Your improved web pages will save money in the long run.

You can spend many non-productive hours trying to teach yourself the latest web technologies. You will end up with many misconceptions and holes in your knowledge. The result can be visual formatting problems, and wasted time trying to debug issues with CSS and Javascript code.

See Also

Check out our curriculums for detailed course suggestions depending on your background and interests.