A history of HTML (1998)
2 - A history of HTML

© Addison Wesley Longman 1998. 
All rights reserved





Included in this chapter is information on:


How the World Wide Web began

The events and circumstances that led to the World Wide Web's
current popularity

How HTML has grown from its conception in the early 1990s



Summary

HTML has had a life-span of roughly seven years. During that
time, it has evolved from a simple language with a small number of
tags to a complex system of mark-up, enabling authors to create
all-singing-and-dancing Web pages complete with animated images,
sound and all manner of gimmicks. This chapter tells you something
about the Web's early days, HTML, and about the people, companies
and organizations who contributed to HTML+, HTML 2, HTML 3.2
and finally, HTML 4.


This chapter is a short history of HTML. Its aim is to give
readers some idea of how the HTML we use today was developed from
the prototype written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. The story is
interesting - not least because HTML has been through an
extremely bumpy ride on the road to standardization, with software
engineers, academics and browser companies haggling about the
language like so many Ministers of Parliament debating in the House
of Commons.

1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web with HTML as its
publishing language

The World Wide Web began life in the place where you would least
expect it: at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in
Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is a meeting place for physicists from all
over the world, where highly abstract and conceptual thinkers engage
in the contemplation of complex atomic phenomena that occur on a
minuscule scale in time and space. This is a surprising place indeed
for the beginnings of a technology which would, eventually, deliver
everything from tourist information, online shopping and
advertisements, financial data, weather forecasts and much more to
your personal computer.

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. In 1989, Tim was
working in a computing services section of CERN when he came up with
the concept; at the time he had no idea that it would be implemented
on such an enormous scale. Particle physics research often involves
collaboration among institutes from all over the world. Tim had the
idea of enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to
organize and pool together information. But far from simply making
available a large number of research documents as files that could
be downloaded to individual computers, he suggested that you could
actually link the text in the files themselves. 

In other words, there could be cross-references from one research
paper to another. This would mean that while reading one research
paper, you could quickly display part of another paper that holds
directly relevant text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific
and mathematical nature would thus be represented as a `web' of
information held in electronic form on computers across the world.
This, Tim thought, could be done by using some form of hypertext,
some way of linking documents together by using buttons on the
screen, which you simply clicked on to jump from one paper to
another. Before coming to CERN, Tim had already worked on document
production and text processing, and had developed his first
hypertext system, `Enquire', in 1980 for his own personal use.

Tim's prototype Web browser on the NeXT computer came out in 1990.

Through 1990: The time was ripe for Tim's invention

The fact that the Web was invented in the early 1990s was no
coincidence. Developments in communications technology during that
time meant that, sooner or later, something like the Web was bound
to happen. For a start, hypertext was coming into vogue and
being used on computers. Also, Internet users were gaining in the
number of users on the system: there was an increasing audience for
distributed information. Last, but not least, the new domain name
system had made it much easier to address a machine on the Internet.

Hypertext

lthough already established as a concept by academics as early as
the 1940s, it was with the advent of the personal computer that
hypertext came out of the cupboard. In the late 1980s, Bill
Atkinson, an exceptionally gifted programmer working for Apple
Computer Inc., came up with an application called Hypercard
for the Macintosh. Hypercard enabled you to construct a series of
on-screen `filing cards' that contained textual and graphical
information. Users could navigate these by pressing on-screen
buttons, taking themselves on a tour of the information in the
process. 

Hypercard set the scene for more applications based on the filing
card idea. Toolbook for the PC was used in the early 1990s for
constructing hypertext training courses that had `pages' with
buttons which could go forward or backward or jump to a new topic.
Behind the scenes, buttons would initiate little programs called
scripts. These scripts would control which page would be presented
next; they could even run a small piece of animation on the screen.
The application entitled Guide was a similar application for UNIX
and the PC.

Hypercard and its imitators caught the popular imagination. However,
these packages still had one major limitation: hypertext jumps could
only be made to files on the same computer. Jumps made to computers
on the other side of the world were still out of the question.
Nobody yet had implemented a system involving hypertext links on a
global scale.

The domain name system

By the middle 1980s, the Internet had a new, easy-to-use system
for naming computers. This involved using the idea of the domain
name. A domain name comprises a series of letters separated by dots,
for example: `www.bo.com' or `www.erb.org.uk'. These names are the
easy-to-use alternative to the much less manageable and cumbersome
IP address numbers.

A program called Distributed Name Service (DNS) maps domain names
onto IP addresses, keeping the IP addresses `hidden'. DNS was an
absolute breakthrough in making the Internet accessible to those who
were not computer nerds. As a result of its introduction, email
addresses became simpler. Previous to DNS, email addresses had all
sorts of hideous codes such as exclamation marks, percent signs and
other extraneous information to specify the route to the other
machine.

Choosing the right approach to create a global hypertext
system

To Tim Berners-Lee, global hypertext links seemed feasible, but
it was a matter of finding the correct approach to implementing
them. Using an existing hypertext package might seem an attractive
proposition, but this was impractical for a number of reasons. To
start with, any hypertext tool to be used worldwide would have to
take into account that many types of computers existed that were
linked to the Internet: Personal Computers, Macintoshes, UNIX
machines and simple terminals. Also, many desktop publishing methods
were in vogue: SGML, Interleaf, LaTex, Microsoft
Word, and Troff among many others. Commercial hypertext packages
were computer-specific and could not easily take text from other
sources; besides, they were far too complicated and involved tedious
compiling of text into internal formats to create the final
hypertext system.

What was needed was something very simple, at least in the
beginning. Tim demonstrated a basic, but attractive way of
publishing text by developing some software himself, and also his
own simple protocol - HTTP - for retrieving other documents'
text via hypertext links. Tim's own protocol, HTTP, stands for
HyperText Transfer Protocol. The text format for HTTP was named
HTML, for HyperText Mark-up Language; Tim's hypertext implementation
was demonstrated on a NeXT workstation, which provided many of the
tools he needed to develop his first prototype. By keeping things
very simple, Tim encouraged others to build upon his ideas and to
design further software for displaying HTML, and for setting up
their own HTML documents ready for access.

Tim bases his HTML on an existing internationally agreed upon
method of text mark-up

The HTML that Tim invented was strongly based on SGML (Standard
Generalized Mark-up Language), an internationally agreed upon method
for marking up text into structural units such as paragraphs,
headings, list items and so on. SGML could be implemented on any
machine. The idea was that the language was independent of the
formatter (the browser or other viewing software) which actually
displayed the text on the screen. The use of pairs of tags such as
<TITLE> and </TITLE> is taken directly
from SGML, which does exactly the same. The SGML elements used in
Tim's HTML included P (paragraph); H1 through
H6 (heading level 1 through heading level 6); OL
(ordered lists); UL (unordered lists); LI (list
items) and various others. What SGML does not include, of course,
are hypertext links: the idea of using the anchor element with the
HREF attribute was purely Tim's invention, as was the now-famous
`www.name.name' format for addressing machines on the Web.

Basing HTML on SGML was a brilliant idea: other people would have
invented their own language from scratch but this might have been
much less reliable, as well as less acceptable to the rest of the
Internet community. Certainly the simplicity of HTML, and the use of
the anchor element A for creating hypertext links, was what
made Tim's invention so useful.

September 1991: Open discussion about HTML across the Internet
begins

Far from keeping his ideas private, Tim made every attempt to
discuss them openly online across the Internet. Coming from a
research background, this was quite a natural thing to do. In
September 1991, the WWW-talk mailing list was started, a kind of
electronic discussion group in which enthusiasts could exchange
ideas and gossip. By 1992, a handful of other academics and computer
researchers were showing interest. Dave Raggett from
Hewlett-Packard's Labs in Bristol, England, was one of these early
enthusiasts, and, following electronic discussion, Dave visited Tim
in 1992. 

Here, in Tim's tiny room in the bowels of the sprawling buildings
of CERN, the two engineers further considered how HTML might be
taken from its current beginnings and shaped into something more
appropriate for mass consumption. Trying to anticipate the kind of
features that users really would like, Dave looked through
magazines, newspapers and other printed media to get an idea of what
sort of HTML features would be important when that same information
was published online. Upon return to England, Dave sat down at his
keyboard and resolutely composed HTML+, a richer version of
the original HTML.

Late 1992: NCSA is intrigued by the idea of the Web

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Tim's ideas had caught
the eye of Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson, both of the National
Center for Supercomputer Applications, a research institute at the
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. They managed to connect
to the computer at CERN and download copies of two free Web
browsers. Realizing the importance of what they saw, NCSA decided to
develop a browser of their own to be called Mosaic. Among
the programmers in the NCSA team were Marc Andreessen - who
later made his millions by selling Web products - and the
brilliant programmer Eric Bina - who also became rich, courtesy
of the Web. Eric Bina was a kind of software genius who reputedly
could stay up three nights in succession, typing in a reverie of
hacking at his computer.

December 1992: Marc Andreessen makes a brief appearance on WWW-
talk

Early Web enthusiasts exchanged ideas and gossip over an
electronic discussion group called WWW-talk. This was where Dave
Raggett, Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly and others debated how images
(photographs, diagrams, illustrations and so on) should be inserted
into HTML documents. Not everyone agreed upon the way that the
relevant tag should be implemented, or even what that tag should be
called. Suddenly, Marc Andreessen appeared on WWW-talk and, without
further to-do, introduced an idea for the IMG tag by the
Mosaic team. 

It was quite plain that the others were not altogether keen on
the design of IMG, but Andreessen was not easily
redirected. The IMG tag was implemented in the form
suggested by the Mosaic team on its browser and remains to this day
firmly implanted in HTML. This was much to the chagrin of supporters
back in academia who invented several alternatives to IMG
in the years to come. Now, with the coming of HTML 4, the
OBJECT tag potentially replaces IMG, but this is,
of course, some years later.

March 1993: Lou Montulli releases the Lynx browser version
2.0a

Lou Montulli was one of the first people to write a text-based
browser, Lynx. The Lynx browser was a text-based browser for
terminals and for computers that used DOS without Windows. Lou
Montulli was later recruited to work with Netscape Communications
Corp., but nonetheless remained partially loyal to the idea of
developing HTML as an open standard, proving a real asset to the
HTML working group and the HTML Editorial Board in years to come.
Lou's enthusiasm for good, expensive wine, and his knowledge of
excellent restaurants in the Silicon Valley area were to make the
standardization of HTML a much more pleasurable process.

Early 1993: Dave Raggett begins to write his own browser

While Eric Bina and the NCSA Mosaic gang were hard at it hacking
through the night, Dave Raggett of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol
was working part-time on his Arena browser, on which he hoped to
demonstrate all sorts of newly invented features for HTML.

April 1993: The Mosaic browser is released

In April 1993, version 1 of the Mosaic browser was released for
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s workstation, a computer used in software
development running the UNIX operating system. Mosaic extended the
features specified by Tim Berners-Lee; for example, it added images,
nested lists and fill-out forms. Academics and software engineers
later would argue that many of these extensions were very much ad
hoc and not properly designed.

Late 1993: Large companies underestimate the importance of the
Web

Dave Raggett's work on the Arena browser was slow because he had
to develop much of it single-handedly: no money was available to pay
for a team of developers. This was because Hewlett-Packard, in
common with many other large computer companies, was quite
unconvinced that the Internet would be a success; indeed, the need
for a global hypertext system simply passed them by. For many large
corporations, the question of whether or not any money could be made
from the Web was unclear from the outset.

There was also a misconception that the Internet was mostly for
academics. In some companies, senior management was assured that the
telephone companies would provide the technology for global
communications of this sort, anyway. The result was that individuals
working in research labs in the commercial sector were unable to
devote much time to Web development. This was a bitter
disappointment to some researchers, who gratefully would have
committed nearly every waking moment toward shaping what they
envisioned would be the communications system of the future.

Dave Raggett, realizing that there were not enough working hours
left for him to succeed at what he felt was an immensely important
task, continued writing his browser at home. There he would sit at a
large computer that occupied a fair portion of the dining room
table, sharing its slightly sticky surface with paper, crayons, Lego
bricks and bits of half-eaten cookies left by the children. Dave
also used the browser to show text flow around images, forms and
other aspects of HTML at the First WWW Conference in Geneva in 1994.
The Arena browser was later used for development work at CERN.

May 1994: NCSA assigns commercial rights for Mosaic browser to
Spyglass, Inc.

In May 1994, Spyglass, Inc. signed a multi-million dollar
licensing agreement with NCSA to distribute a commercially enhanced
version of Mosaic. In August of that same year, the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the home of NCSA, assigned all future
commercial rights for NCSA Mosaic to Spyglass.

May 1994: The first World Wide Web conference is held in Geneva,
with HTML+ on show

Although Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had commercial interests
in mind, the rest of the World Wide Web community had quite a
different attitude: they saw themselves as joint creators of a
wonderful new technology, which certainly would benefit the world.
They were jiggling with excitement. Even quiet and retiring
academics became animated in discussion, and many seemed evangelical
about their new-found god of the Web.

At the first World Wide Web conference organized by CERN in May
1994, all was merry with 380 attendees - who mostly were from
Europe but also included many from the United States. You might have
thought that Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and Eric Bina surely would
be there, but they were not. For the most part, participants were
from the academic community, from institutions such as the World
Meteorological Organization, the International Center for
Theoretical Physics, the University of Iceland and so on. Later
conferences had much more of a commercial feel, but this one was for
technical enthusiasts who instinctively knew that this was the start
of something big.



At the World Wide Web conference in Geneva.
Left to right: Joseph Hardin from NCSA, Robert Cailliau from CERN,
Tim Berners-Lee from CERN and Dan Connolly (of HTML 2 fame) then
working for Hal software.

During the course of that week, awards were presented for notable
achievements on the Web; these awards were given to Marc Andreessen,
Lou Montulli, Eric Bina, Rob Hartill and Kevin Hughes. Dan Connolly,
who proceeded to define HTML 2, gave a slide presentation entitled
Interoperability: Why Everyone Wins, which explained why it
was important that the Web operated with a proper HTML
specification. Strange to think that at least three of the people
who received awards at the conference were later to fly in the face
of Dan's idea that adopting a cross-company uniform standard for
HTML was essential.

Dave Raggett had been working on some new HTML ideas, which he
called HTML+. At the conference it was agreed that the work on
HTML+ should be carried forward to lead to the development of
an HTML 3 standard. Dave Raggett, together with CERN, developed
Arena further as a proof-of-concept browser for this work. Using
Arena, Dave Raggett, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Håkon Lie and
others demonstrated text flow around a figure with captions,
resizable tables, image backgrounds, math and other features.



A panel discussion at the Geneva conference.
Kevin Altis from Intel, Dave Raggett from HP Labs, Rick `Channing'
Rodgers from the National Library of Medicine.

The conference ended with a glorious evening cruise on board a
paddle steamer around Lake Geneva with Wolfgang and the
Werewolves providing Jazz accompaniment.

September 1994: The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) sets
up an HTML working group

In early 1994, an Internet Engineering Task Force working group
was set up to deal with HTML.

he Internet Engineering Task Force is the international standards
and development body of the Internet and is a large, open community
of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned
with the evolution and smooth operation of the Internet
architecture. The technical work of the IETF is done in working
groups, which are organized by topic into several areas; for
example, security, network routing, and applications. The IETF is,
in general, part of a culture that sees the Internet as belonging to
The People. This was even more so in the early days of the Web.

he feelings of the good `ole days of early Web development are
captured in the song, The Net Flag, which can be found
`somewhere on the Internet'. The first verse runs as follows:


The people's web is deepest red,
And oft it's killed our routers dead.
But ere the bugs grew ten days old,
The patches fixed the broken code.

Chorus:

So raise the open standard high
Within its codes we'll live or die
Though cowards flinch and Bill Gates sneers
We'll keep the net flag flying here.


In keeping with normal IETF practices, the HTML working group was
open to anyone in the engineering community: any interested computer
scientist could potentially become a member and, once on its mailing
list, could take part in email debate. The HTML working group met
approximately three times a year, during which time they would enjoy
a good haggle about HTML features present and future, be pleasantly
suffused with coffee and beer, striding about plush hotel lobbies
sporting pony tails, T-shirts and jeans without the slightest care.

July 1994: HTML specification for HTML 2 is released

During 1993 and early 1994, lots of browsers had added their own
bits to HTML; the language was becoming ill-defined. In an effort to
make sense of the chaos, Dan Connolly and colleagues collected all
the HTML tags that were widely used and collated them into a draft
document that defined the breadth of what Tim Berners-Lee called
HTML 2. The draft was then circulated through the Internet community
for comment. With the patience of a saint, Dan took into account
numerous suggestions from HTML enthusiasts far and wide, ensuring
that all would be happy with the eventual HTML 2 definition. He also
wrote a Document Type Definition for HTML 2, a kind of
mathematically precise description of the language.

November 1994: Netscape is formed

During 1993, Marc Andreessen apparently felt increasingly
irritated at simply being on the Mosaic project rather than
in charge of it. Upon graduating, he decided to leave NCSA and head
for California where he met Jim Clark, who was already well known in
Silicon Valley and who had money to invest. Together they formed
Mosaic Communications, which then became Netscape Communications
Corp. in November, 1994. What they planned to do was create and
market their very own browser.

The browser they designed was immensely successful - so much
so in fact, that for some time to come, many users would mistakenly
think that Netscape invented the Web. Netscape did its best to make
sure that even those who were relying on a low-bandwidth connection
- that is, even those who only had a modem-link from a home
personal computer - were able to access the Web effectively.
This was greatly to the company's credit.

Following a predictable path, Netscape began inventing its own
HTML tags as it pleased without first openly discussing them with
the Web community. Netscape rarely made an appearance at the big
International WWW conferences, but it seemed to be driving the HTML
standard. It was a curious situation, and one that the inner core of
the HTML community felt they must redress.

Late 1994: The World Wide Web Consortium forms

The World Wide Web Consortium was formed in late 1994 to fulfill
the potential of the Web through the development of open standards.
They had a strong interest in HTML. Just as an orchestra insists on
the best musicians, so the consortium recruited many of the
best-known names in the Web community. Headed up by Tim Berners-Lee,
here are just some of the players in the band today (1997):



Members of the World Wide Web Consortium at the MIT site.
From left to right are Henrick Frystyk Neilsen, Anselm Baird-Smith,
Jay Sekora, Rohit Khare, Dan Connolly, Jim Gettys, Tim Berners-Lee,
Susan Hardy, Jim Miller, Dave Raggett, Tom Greene, Arthur Secret,
Karen MacArthur.



Dave Raggett on HTML; from the United Kingdom.
Arnaud le Hors on HTML; from France.
Dan Connolly on HTML; from the United States.

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen on HTTP and on enabling the Web to go
faster; from Denmark.

Håkon Lie on style sheets; from Norway. He is located
in France, working at INRIA.

Bert Bos on style sheets and layout; from the Netherlands.

Jim Miller on investigating technologies that could be used
in rating the content of Web pages; from the United States.

Chris Lilley on style sheets and font support; from the
United Kingdom.


The W3 Consortium is based in part at the Laboratory of Computer
Science at Massachusetts' Institute of Technology in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, in the United States; and in part at INRIA, the
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en
Automatique, a French governmental research institute. The W3
Consortium is also located in part at Keio University in Japan. You
can look at the Consortium's Web pages on `www.w3.org'.

The consortium is sponsored by a number of companies that
directly benefit from its work on standards and other technology for
the Web. The member companies include Digital Equipment Corp.;
Hewlett-Packard Co.; IBM Corp.; Microsoft Corp.; Netscape
Communications Corp.; and Sun Microsystems Inc., among many others.

Through 1995: HTML is extended with many new tags

During 1995, all kinds of new HTML tags emerged. Some, like the
BGCOLOR attribute of the BODY element and FONT
FACE, which control stylistic aspects of a document, found
themselves in the black books of the academic engineering community.
`You're not supposed to be able to do things like that in HTML,'
they would protest. It was their belief that such things as text
color, background texture, font size and font face were definitely
outside the scope of a language when their only intent was to
specify how a document would be organized.

March 1995: HTML 3 is published as an Internet Draft

Dave Raggett had been working for some time on his new ideas for
HTML, and at last he formalized them in a document published as an
Internet Draft in March, 1995. All manner of HTML features were
covered. A new tag for inserting images called FIG was
introduced, which Dave hoped would supersede IMG, as well
as a whole gambit of features for marking up math and scientific
documents. Dave dealt with HTML tables and tabs, footnotes and
forms. He also added support for style sheets by including a
STYLE tag and a CLASS attribute. The latter was to
be available on every element to encourage authors to give HTML
elements styles, much as you do in desktop publishing.

Although the HTML 3 draft was very well received, it was somewhat
difficult to get it ratified by the IETF. The belief was that the
draft was too large and too full of new proposals. To get consensus
on a draft 150 pages long and about which everyone wanted to voice
an opinion was optimistic - to say the least. In the end, Dave
and the inner circle of the HTML community decided to call it a day.

Of course, browser writers were very keen on supporting HTML 3
- in theory. Inevitably, each browser writer chose to implement
a different subset of HTML 3's features as they were so inclined,
and then proudly proclaimed to support the standard. The confusion
was mind-boggling, especially as browsers even came out with
extensions to HTML 3, implying to the ordinary gent that
normal HTML 3 was, of course, already supported. Was there
an official HTML 3 standard or not? The truth was that there was
not, but reading the computer press you might never have known the
difference.

March 1995: A furor over the HTML Tables specification

Dave Raggett's HTML 3 draft had tackled the tabular organization
of information in HTML. Arguments over this aspect of the language
had continued for some time, but now it was time to really get
going. At the 32nd meeting of the IETF in Danvers, Massachusetts,
Dave found a group from the SGML brethren who were up in arms over
part of the tables specification because it contradicted the CALS
table model. Groups such as the US Navy use the CALS table model in
complex documentation. After long negotiation, Dave managed to
placate the CALS table delegates and altered the draft to suit their
needs. HTML tables, which were not in HTML originally, finally
surfaced from the HTML 3 draft to appear in HTML 3.2. They continue
to be used extensively for the purpose of providing a layout grid
for organizing pictures and text on the screen.

August 1995: Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser comes out

Version 1.0 of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser was
announced. This browser was eventually to compete with Netscape's
browser, and to evolve its own HTML features. To a certain extent,
Microsoft built its business on the Web by extending HTML features.
The ActiveX feature made Microsoft's browser unique, and Netscape
developed a plug-in called Ncompass to handle ActiveX. This whole
idea whereby one browser experiments with an extension to HTML only
to find others adding support to keep even, continues to the
present.

In November 1995, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 2.0
arrived for its Windows NT and Windows 95 operating systems.

September 1995: Netscape submits a proposal for frames

By this time, Netscape submitted a proposal for frames, which
involved the screen being divided into independent, scrollable
areas. The proposal was implemented on Netscape's Navigator browser
before anyone really had time to comment on it, but nobody was
surprised.

November 1995: The HTML working group runs into problems

The HTML working group was an excellent idea in theory, but in
practice things did not go quite as expected. With the immense
popularity of the Web, the HTML working group grew larger and
larger, and the volume of associated email soared exponentially.
Imagine one hundred people trying to design a house. `I want the
windows to be double-glazed,' says one. `Yes, but shouldn't we make
them smaller, while we're at it,' questions another. Still others
chime in: `What material do you propose for the frames - I'm not
having them in plastic, that's for sure'; `I suggest that we don't
have windows, as such, but include small, circular port-holes on the
Southern elevation...' and so on.

You get the idea. The HTML working group emailed each other in a
frenzy of electronic activity. In the end, its members became so
snowed under with email that no time was left for programming. For
software engineers, this was a sorry state of affairs, indeed: `I
came back after just three days away to find over 2000 messages
waiting,' was the unhappy lament of the HTML enthusiast.

Anyway, the HTML working group still was losing ground to the
browser vendors. The group was notably slow in coming to a consensus
on a given HTML feature, and commercial organizations were hardly
going to sit around having tea, pleasantly conversing on the weather
whilst waiting for the results of debates. And they did not.

November 1995: Vendors unite to form a new group dedicated to
developing an HTML standard

In November, 1995 Dave Raggett called together representatives of
the browser companies and suggested they meet as a small group
dedicated to standardizing HTML. Imagine his surprise when it
worked! Lou Montulli from Netscape, Charlie Kindel from Microsoft,
Eric Sink from Spyglass, Wayne Gramlich from Sun Microsystems, Dave
Raggett, Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly from the W3 Consortium,
and Jonathan Hirschman from Pathfinder convened near Chicago and
made quick and effective decisions about HTML.

November 1995: Style sheets for HTML documents begin to take
shape

Bert Bos, Håkon Lie, Dave Raggett, Chris Lilley and others
from the World Wide Web Consortium and others met in Versailles near
Paris to discuss the deployment of Cascading Style Sheets. The name
Cascading Style Sheets implies that more than one style sheet can
interact to produce the final look of the document. Using a special
language, the CSS group advocated that everyone would soon be able
to write simple styles for HTML, as one would do in Microsoft Word
and other desktop publishing software packages. The SGML contingent,
who preferred a LISP-like language called DSSSL - it rhymes with
whistle - seemed out of the race when Microsoft promised to
implement CSS on its Internet Explorer browser.

November 1995: Internationalization of HTML Internet Draft

Gavin Nicol, Gavin Adams and others presented a long paper on the
internationalization of the Web. Their idea was to extend the
capabilities of HTML 2, primarily by removing the restriction on the
character set used. This would mean that HTML could be used to mark
up languages other than those that use the Latin-1 character set to
include a wider variety of alphabets and character sets, such as
those that read from right to left.

December 1995: The HTML working group is dismantled

Since the IETF HTML working group was having difficulties coming
to consensus swiftly enough to cope with such a fast-evolving
standard, it was eventually dismantled.

February 1996: The HTML ERB is formed

Following the success of the November, 1995 meeting, the World
Wide Web Consortium formed the HTML Editorial Review Board to help
with the standardization process. This board consisted of
representatives from IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, Softquad and
the W3 Consortium, and did its business via telephone conference and
email exchanges, meeting approximately once every three months. Its
aim was to collaborate and agree upon a common standard for HTML,
thus putting an end to the era when browsers each implemented a
different subset of the language. The bad fairy of incompatibility
was to be banished from the HTML kingdom forever, or one could hope
so, perhaps.

Dan Connolly of the W3 Consortium, also author of HTML 2, deftly
accomplished the feat of chairing what could be quite a raucous
meeting of the clans. Dan managed to make sure that all
representatives had their say and listened to each other's point of
view in an orderly manner. A strong chair was absolutely essential
in these meetings.

In preparation for an ERB meeting, specifications describing new
aspects of HTML were made electronically available for ERB members
to read. Then, at the meeting itself, the proponent explained some
of the rationale behind the specification, and then dearly hoped
that all who were present also concurred that the encapsulated ideas
were sound. Questions such as, `should a particular feature be
included, or should we kick it out,' would be considered. Each
representative would air his point of view. If all went well, the
specification might eventually see daylight and become a standard.
At the time of writing, the next HTML standard, code-named
Cougar, has begun its long journey in this direction.

The BLINK tag was ousted in an HTML ERB meeting.
Netscape would only abolish it if Microsoft agreed to get rid of
MARQUEE; the deal was struck and both tags disappeared.
Both of these extensions have always been considered slightly goofy
by all parties. Many tough decisions were to be made about the
OBJECT specification. Out of a chaos of several different
tags - EMBED, APP, APPLET,
DYNSRC and so on - all associated with embedding
different types of information in HTML documents, a single
OBJECT tag was chosen in April, 1996. This OBJECT
tag becomes part of the HTML standard, but not until 1997.

April 1996: The W3 Consortium working draft on Scripting comes
out

Based on an initial draft by Charlie Kindel, and, in turn,
derived from Netscape's extensions for JavaScript, a W3C working
draft on the subject of Scripting was written by Dave Raggett. In
one form or another, this draft should eventually become part of
standard HTML.

July 1996: Microsoft seems more interested than first imagined
in open standards

In April 1996, Microsoft's Internet Explorer became available for
Macintosh and Windows 3.1 systems.

Thomas Reardon had been excited by the Web even at the second WWW
conference held in Darmstadt, Germany in 1995. One year later, he
seemed very interested in the standardization process and apparently
wanted Microsoft to do things the right way with the W3C and with
the IETF. Traditionally, developers are somewhat disparaging about
Microsoft, so this was an interesting turn of events. It should be
said that Microsoft did, of course, invent tags of their own, just
as did Netscape. These included the remarkable MARQUEE tag
that caused great mirth among the more academic HTML community. The
MARQUEE tag made text dance about all over the screen -
not exactly a feature you would expect from a serious language
concerned with structural mark-up such as paragraphs, headings and
lists.

The worry that a massive introduction of proprietary products
would kill the Web continued. Netscape acknowledged that vendors
needed to push ahead of the standards process and innovate. They
pointed out that, if users like a particular Netscape innovation,
then the market would drive it to become a de facto standard. This
seemed quite true at the time and, indeed, Netscape has innovated on
top of that standard again. It's precisely this sequence of events
that Dave Raggett and the World Wide Web Consortium were trying to
avoid.

December 1996: Work on `Cougar' is begun

The HTML ERB became the HTML Working Group and began to work on
`Cougar', the next version of HTML with completion late Spring,
1997, eventually to become HTML 4. With all sorts of innovations for
the disabled and support for international languages, as well as
providing style sheet support, extensions to forms, scripting and
much more, HTML 4 breaks away from the simplicity and charm of HTML
of earlier years!



Dave Raggett, co-editor of the HTML 4 specification, at
work composing at the keyboard at his home in Boston.

January 1997: HTML 3.2 is ready

Success! In January 1997, the W3 Consortium formally endorsed
HTML 3.2 as an HTML cross-industry specification. HTML 3.2 had been
reviewed by all member organizations, including major browser
vendors such as Netscape and Microsoft. This meant that the
specification was now stable and approved of by most Web players. By
providing a neutral forum, the W3 Consortium had successfully
obtained agreement upon a standard version of HTML. There was great
rejoicing, indeed. HTML 3.2 took the existing IETF HTML 2 standard
and incorporated features from HTML+ and HTML 3. HTML 3.2
included tables, applets, text flow around images, subscripts and
superscripts.
 
One might well ask why HTML 3.2 was called HTML 3.2 and not,
let's say, HTML 3.1 or HTML 3.5. The version number is open to
discussion just as much as is any other aspect of HTML. The version
number is often one of the last details to be decided.

Update

Spring 1998: Cougar has now fully materialized as HTML 4.0 and is
a W3C Proposed Recommendation. But do the major browsers implement
HTML 4.0, you wonder? As usual in the computer industry, there is no
simple answer. Certainly things are heading in that direction.
Neither Netscape's or Microsofts browser completely implements style
sheets in the way specified, which is a pity, but no doubt they will
make amends. There are a number of pecularities in the way that
OBJECT works but we very much hope that this will also eventually be
implemented in a more consistent manner.

© Addison Wesley Longman 1998. 
All rights reserved
