BroWWWsers
the beginning there was
HTML 1 (never officially referred to as version 1).
The tags were
TITLE, A, ISINDEX, PLAINTEXT, LISTING, P, H1 - H6, ADDRESS,
DL, DT, DD, UL, LI, MENU, and DIR.
Just 20 tags; now there are
90..
Life was simple - no images, forms, or tables !
Then along came a certain Marc Andreessen at
NCSA who added the IMG tag in
Mosaic for
X Windows.
(This browser is credited with triggering the WWW explosion;
certainly it caused me to trash 6 months of work on a
platform-independent graphical user interface to astrophysics data,
and start over using Mosaic and CGI/Perl instead).
We didn't need to worry (much) about standards then, because there was
only one popular browser (there were others, often with musical names
like Viola and Cello).
But then the Mosaic team went off and became Netscape; and not too much
later Microsoft staked their claim..
Later came
HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866),
HTML+,
HTML 3.0,
HTML 3.2, and
HTML 4.0.
The "browser wars" and subsequent differentiation between the
proprietary versions of HTML - often very different from the W3C's
specifications - is too well-known to need elaboration here.
Suffice it to say that
"Lack of standards makes websites more expensive for
clients and developers, makes pages break for users, and will break
the web itself, unless the situation improves." (from
The Web Standards Project).
Many designers take advantage of the quirks and by-products of
browser rendering decisions, with no regard for the portability
of their designs to situations outside well-known and highly
restrictive boundaries. This almost always results in technically
invalid HTML.
The fundamental philosophy underlying the nature of HTML is that it is
a structurally-based, presentation-independent markup language, to be
presented by a very diverse variety of devices - e.g. monitors of
various sizes and resolutions; text-to-speech synthesisers;
portable digital assistants (PDAs); etc.
You should note that trickery (such as indenting within list
containers, but no list items) is no longer necessary for layout
effects, since HTML 4.0 plus CSS afford you far better control.
If you are willing to allow your page layout some flexibility then the
situation is somewhat better, but still not ideal.
For example, the
OBJECT element,
intended for reliably embedding objects
(such as images, video, sound, applets etc)
into HTML documents, although recognised by both Netscape and Explorer,
isn't particularly well-supported. Some of the deficiencies are
neatly summarised in
Objects, Images and Applets.
Of course, it's important to actually know the standard, and
admittedly, that's easier said than done. If you followed the common
advice to learn HTML by 'viewing source' and studying the HTML from
various web sites - you may well have picked up some bad habits and
learnt proprietary tags and attributes without being aware of it.
Books aren't necessarily any better, even if you'd expect them to go
through technical editing to screen out the errors. I have books that
talk about the <bold> and ALT tags - neither of which exist,
not even in Microscape HTML.
While we're on the subject - let's just check the terminology.
<TAG attribute = "value">Content</TAG>
Tags are named by the first word after the '<' and may have some
'attributes' - words just before '=' signs. These attributes are
given values by the text that follows the '=' sign - normally
enclosed in double quotes, but this is optional if the values aren't
case sensitive and consist of only alphanumerics (letters and digits).
The best start to learning HTML (IMHO) is to learn from an
HTML 4.0 compliant HTML 4.0 tutorial
(in case you think that was unnecessarily redundant - most HTML
tutorials do not validate.
Beware!)
And be aware of the
browser makers own HTML specifications and policy statements.
HTML Standards Compliance - Why Bother ?
Be Careful What You Wish For..
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