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 means text stored in electronic form with cross-reference links between pages.
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a language for describing how pages of text, graphics,
and other information are organized, formatted, 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.
This hour guides you through the creation of your first Web page.
The best way to follow along with this hour is to actually create
a Web page as you read and model it after the example pages developed here in the book.
If you're a little nervous about jumping right in, you might want to read this hour once
to get the general idea and then go through it again at your computer while you work on
your own page.
