● Web history

o ARPANet, the first worldwide network was developed by the Advanced

Research Project Agency (ARPA). ARPA was started in 1958 by Eisenhower
and several MIT professors. ARPANet existed from from1969 to 1990, when
the government private agencies like CERN access to the network
technology.
o The term Hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960’s.
o One of Nelson’s contemporaries Tim Berners-Lee (of CERN) is credited as
the father of the WWW. With help from Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee
developed the first browser and expanded web protocols like FTP
among other things. (1990-93)
o By 1994 terms like email and HTML were household words. Now we have all
sorts of hypermedia. The Internet, INTERconnected NETworks, is
definitely here to stay. At this point, it can only grow. We, the users,
determine how and where it does that. Horrible monstrosity or marvelous
tool, we decide that.
● Basic Beginning Terminology
o Server can refer to web server or data server that makes files available to
web clients over the Internet.
o Web client can refer to a web browser or other interface that brings the
user in contact with data from a server. (Popular web browsers are Internet
Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, and Opera)
o Protocol is a set of rules that govern how web communications happen.
HTTP, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol, defines how web
servers and browsers communicate. FTP, or file transfer protocol, sets the
standards for how files are transferred. (The first well used one was TCP/IP
which came out of ARPANet)
o URL, or uniform resource locator, is the address of the resource (web site,
file, etc) on the Internet.
o HTML, hypertext markup language, is a system of coding pages for the
World Wide Web (WWW).
● Coding web pages uses HTML tags. Tags are letters or abbreviations that
appear in pointy brackets that surround the web content. Most tags must
have an opening and a closing.
● Nowadays HTML coding obeys set standards but unfortunately this has not
always been the case. There are still web pages on the Web that use
outdated code that cases pages to no longer browse properly. In addition,
HTML coding evolves faster that browsers are upgraded. This means that a
page may look fine in one browser but ‘break’ in another. For practice with
basic coding see the Resource List below.