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HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language", it is the language used to create Web pages. Basically HTML is composed of "tags", these tags give general purpose information to your Web browser on how to display Web page content.

Learning HTML is easy, one only needs to learn a handful of basic HTML tags and how to properly apply them. First, lets look at the Web and hypertext:

Although the Internet is 3 decades old, the World Wide Web (WWW) didn't appear until the early '90s. It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee to help physicists keep track of cross-references. The Web consists of servers, which are computers running special programs, hooked-up to the Internet. These servers store web documents. These documents are retrieved by browsers, which are software applications for a PC, terminal, workstation, or Ray-Ban. These browsers allow you to see the documents from a server displayed on your monitor screen.

The biggest gun that the Web offered was the ability to activate "hyperlinks" in text (as if end-users were not addicted enough to point-and-click already thanks to Win & Mac). The hyperlink was designed to retrieve a document for the user rather than the user having to understand how to search for a document on their own. However the Internet community basically ignored the Web, until some students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urban-Campaign (UIUC) wrote and released a program called "Mosaic" (prior to the government removing it's fondling funding fingers from NSF finger puppet).

This program was the first Web graphical browser. Funding for this project came from the NSF, therefore it was public domain. The program utilized a graphical user interface (GUI) to make it easy for anyone to use the Web without being an MIT grad. In 1993 Mosaic was released for "Microsoft Windows" and Web traffic became at least 1% of the NSF's backbone traffic. The door had been opened for the average person to step onto the Net and join the information revolution. The Web had become the #8 protocol (method of using the Net) people were using when they were on the high-speed backbone. The top 4 protocols during 1993 were (e-mail, file transfer, Telnet and Usenet). Two years later during 1995, the Web became the #1 protocol on the Internet.

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Author Charles E. Brown
Company EWM / PSI
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Created Jan-01-1999
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