Erik Florida

In the beginning…Tim Berners-Lee Created HTML

Posted on 04 / 17 / 10 Catagory: HTML/CSS.

In order to discuss the purpose and importance of XHTML and CSS, we must first look at the original purpose and use of the Internet, and how those uses have evolved. During the Cold War, the US Department of Defense wanted to develop a means for sharing information for intelligence purposes. The Advanced Research Projects Agency established the first packet switching network (ARPANet) on October 29, 1969. From here, the Internet slowly developed over the next 20 years using the TCP/IP, Internet protocol suite for data transmission. The Internet at the time mainly consisted of Universities sharing information. In 1993 the first recognized Internet browser was developed, known as Mosaic (you can still download Mosaic from the NCSA Web site).  Mosaic opened the Internet up to the everyday user. It was now accessible, as well as more functional, with its use of HTML. HTML is a markup language that was developed to give context for graphical interpretation of data by the browser.

Hyper text markup language was developed by Tim Burns-Lee, along with a browser for interpretation in the latter part of 1990. HTML’s design was based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). SGML is not a markup language in itself, however it is a guideline for creating a markup language. Tags are the core component to any markup language. The purpose behind a markup language is to put data into context. Take a typical essay paper layout for example. Say you write the paper in MS Word. You use a large, bold, centered title, then put your name in a smaller, italicized font below that. Then you start writing. You have an introduction, three main paragraphs for each point, and then a conclusion. Word uses a proprietary system to store and interpret the layout and style of the text on the page.

A basic Web browser can only interpret simple text. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is an important one. So let’s imagine we take this nicely formatted Word document, copy all the text, and paste it into Notepad. Now you have lost all of your formatting. It is all just letters and spaces. This is the first step to creating an HTML document. You now have all your content, but no markup, no tags, no way to identify how the information should be displayed. You can actually save a plain text file as an HTML file and the browser will output the text, just like Notepad will. However, the point of the Web was to share information, and it is hard to interpret data that is displayed in plain text.

Enter the markup language. In order to contextualize the information provided in a file, HTML was developed for browsers to use as a means to interpret context. Now you can use HTML tags to identify the header (or title) of a document. You can identify a paragraph as such, and give it an ID, like ‘<p id=”first argument” >Content Here</p>’ Now you don’t just know that this is a block of text, you know that it is a paragraph, and you can identify this paragraph as the first argument. When you hear Web designers talk about semantic markup, this is what they are talking about. Using tags and ID’s and classes that make the HTML markup specifically relevant and purposeful to the context of the information.

A common misconception about HTML is that it is supposed to be used to establish format, colors, layout, etc. to a document. This is not really inline with the concept of the markup language. The purpose is to mark up the text with tags that identify each element of the text document, in order to create context. The additional feature of being able to then control layout with HTML should never have been available, in my opinon. From the very beginning, using the HTML itself to control the layout gave the HTML dual purposes. You use it first to identify the content, then you use it to manipulate the content. Structure creates order, and order creates consistency and reliability. Giving HTML a dual purpose was a mistake from the beginning. Tables are evil!

This is where CSS comes in. There are many benefits and uses for CSS, but the concept is simple. HTML is used to identify the different elements in a text document. CSS is used to layout and stylize the information, based on the markup.