Once upon a time, back when there weren't any footprints on the moon, some far-sighted folks decided to see whether they could connect several major computer networks together. I'll spare you the names and stories (there are plenty of both), but the eventual result was the "mother of all networks," which we call the Internet. Until 1990, accessing information through the Internet was a rather technical affair. It was so hard, in fact, that even Ph.D.-holding physicists were often frustrated when trying to swap data. One such physicist, the now-famous Tim Berners-Lee, cooked up a way to easily cross-reference text on the Internet through "hypertext" links. This wasn't a new idea, but his simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) managed to thrive while more ambitious hypertext projects floundered. Hypertext originally meant text stored in electronic form with cross-reference links between pages. It is now a broader term that refers to just about any object (text, images, files, and so on) that can be linked to other objects. Hypertext Markup Language is a language for describing how pages of text, graphics, and other information are organized and linked together. By 1993, almost 100 computers throughout the world were equipped to serve up HTML pages. Those interlinked pages were dubbed the World Wide Web (WWW), and several web browser programs had been written to allow people to view web pages. Because of the popularity of the Web, a few programmers soon wrote web browsers that could view graphics images along with the text on a web page. One of these programmers was Marc Andressen; he went on to become rich and famous, selling one of the world's most popular web browsers, Netscape Navigator. Today, HTML pages are the standard interface to the Internet. They can include animated graphics, sound and video, complete interactive programs, and good old-fashioned text. Millions of web pages are retrieved and viewed each day from thousands of web server computers around the world. Incidentally, the term "web" arose from the fact that web pages are linked together in such a way that they form a massive web of information, roughly akin to a spider's web. This is also why you sometimes hear the term "crawler," which refers to a program that wanders around the Web gathering information on web pages.
The Web is rapidly becoming a mass-market medium, as high-speed Internet connections through TV cables, modernized phone lines, direct satellite feeds, and both public and private wireless networks become increasingly commonplace. You can already browse the Web using a small box attached to your television instead of using your computer, with the cost of such devices likely to fall sharply over the next few years. In other words, it may not be necessary to rely on a computer for web browsing in the near future. Yet the Internet is no longer the only place you'll find HTML. Most private corporate networks (called intranets) now use HTML to provide business information to employees and clients. HTML is now the interface of choice for publishing presentations on CD-ROM and the very popular high-capacity digital versatile disk (DVD) format. Microsoft has even integrated HTML directly into the Windows operating system, allowing every storage folder in your computer to be associated with an HTML page and hypertext links to other folders and pages. In short, HTML is everywhere. Fortunately, you're in the right place to find out how HTML web pages work and how to create them.
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