A brief history of web design: HTML

// December 8th, 2009 // wordpress

Well, for my first post, I might as well concentrate it on the thing that I love to work with. To get an appreciation of how important something like WordPress is and what it and other similar platforms represent, you have to take a brief look at the history of web design. The more you learn about how web design has evolved with the internet, the easier it is to understand why something like a blogging platform represents something so revolutionary.

I will try to explain in a simple fashion, so people unfamiliar with this kind of thing can still read, learn, and appreciate where I’m coming from.

Onto HTML!

Back in the old days, before the internet was considered a mainstream consumer product, HTML described text and links, nothing more. For those unfamiliar with internet lingo, HTML (Hypertext markup language) is a language that describes how a webpage appears.

It has evolved and branched off more simplified versions like XHTML, and is still being improved. But back in the early nineties, even with it’s added ability to point to things like images and tables, it was very simple and limited. It wasn’t designed with multimedia and interactivity in mind, it was merely initially a quick way to transmit text over the slow speeds on the early internet.

In the mid-nineties, an entire website could be presented well with HTML, but it still required that everything be specified down to the letter in the code. Every table, every font change, every image, these were all coded in manually. High school Computer Science classes taught a bit of it, and simple webpages could be created literally by using a text editor like notepad to fashion the pages bit by bit.

The most complex purely HTML based webpage of the nineties could have some tables in it (tables are arranged into cells, think Microsoft Excel) to present information in an organized fashion. It could also be arranged into frames, usually dictated by a master HTML file like index.html (frames are essentially web pages in a webpage, a glorified table). There could be some flashy images, initially in the GIF format, but later used in the very useful JPEG format, which greatly decreased loading times for small losses of quality. Things like image maps were also possible, where an image was used and split into sections that could link to different URLs.

With the introduction of initially simple but effective site building programs like the aforementioned Microsoft Frontpage, sites could be built a lot faster, but ultimately, you had to deal with the limitations of HTML. Pressure was needed for more of two things: functionality, and artistic license. It’s these two things that have pushed webpages to adopt the mish-mash of languages that they have today.

So HTML was the foundation of modern internet information presentation, and to this day, is still ultimately what allows you to make sense of a web page. Any self-respecting web designer should be able to look at the HTML ‘source code’ of a webpage and find their way about it. It’s the end-product a server gives to your browser, and it’s what allows you to read this post and browse this site.

As far as I can see, it may evolve and expand in functionality (I hear that the next instalment, if it ever gets into the mainstream, will allow very interesting stuff to be supported, like direct audio/video streaming without the need for 3rd party plugins like Flash), but will always retain the same old HTML tags and standards web geeks around the world have come to know and love.

Next up, I will touch on something called scripting. In the meantime, read my random posts of life in the Lebanese culture, all coming soon! I’ll try to be frequent and keep some interesting stuff coming.