A great question from @jenstrickland which can clarify a lot for folks learning the differences between the internet the web can refine understanding about what parts make which layer and the role of those parts. Changes have occurred I will write generally. Questions welcome.
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The internet itself provides the platform via the TCP/IP stack. The web itself has three primary pieces that come together as the World Wide Web. The hypertext markup language HTML, the hypertext transfer protocol http, and the URL uniform resource locator.
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HTML comes from the standardized generalized markup language written by Charles Goldfarb it is very verbose mostly because of his work as an attorney. Sgml is considered a metal language this means other languages and applications are made with its guidelines.
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HTML is a declarative interpretive markup language. Declarative means that we are describing what something is not how it works. Interpreting a language requires an interpreter in this case the user agent or what we are most familiar with the web browser.
May 23, 2022 · 1:13 AM UTC
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When it was formalized the first thing we would see at the top of an HTML document would be a declaration. This declaration comes from sgml and defines the document type and provides a URL where the elements attributes and other aspects of the language are outlined and defined.
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After the doctype declaration we have the root element of HTML followed by the head elements the title elements any metadata which is data that's not displayed but is important to the processing and interpretation of the document. The body contains our content.
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In the head elements we find such things as the title Elements which is required and helpful for orientation within a site as well as enhancing understanding about what that page content is focused on. We'll also see character set, key words, description and other items.
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Once we close the head elements properly we can move on to the body. This is where our content which we want to be displayed in the browser goes and marked up accordingly such as H1-H6, paragraphs, lists, tables, and other information describing the content.
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A lot more information about how the structure emerges overtime but understand that prior to CSS the concept of semantics as being meaningful to the content or presentational of the content was not an initial concern although it became one with time.
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Again the idea is to have created a Content Rich document with links to other Pages or other sites that expand the information available.
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The HTTP or hypertext transfer protocol now most often only seen as HTTPS which adds a layer of security is the protocol that transfers one click of a link request to the reference document. The URL would be the location address of the document we want to link with.
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So far pretty easy in general to understand. There is no style and there is no presentational HTML so much at this point so browsers would display content fairly similarly and structurally in order of the content within the document.
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In the open web stack another layer occurs and that is the presentation layer this is CSS. CSS can words that can be in the elements in the document in the document head as a link or imports to an external CSS file or a user Style which a usercan create and he or she might want.
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We can also have what's known as an embedded style sheet which is placed in the head portion of the documents inside Style Elements and they are to control singular page needs. This is ncss known as origin. What is the origin of the rule? It's in the external stylesheet.
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Some styles are inherited others are not it just depends upon the dtd in use. Do you have the same style or similar elsewhere? you may end up with a conflict meaning you must change the sort order or specificity as needed.
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More to come that's a simple intro now for dinner and watch party with my brother and his Ronnie bear as is our weekend tradition. I'll stop back with the next steps as I can. Please feel free to ask questions or clarifications in this simple explanation the web.😎
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So if you continue where we are at this point in history is that HTML and CSS are both declarative languages that are complementary. Unfortunately the challenge that occurred and next came through the concerns I was expressing earlier and that is with tools we use.
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Developers were also really hungry for more CSS which wasn't getting great implementation across browsers which is sort of where my I don't work here. Off in the industry as the browser Wars emerged. We wanted layout we want to design we wanted Behavior to enhance experiences
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So in the next few years right around 97-98 we had some CSS we had HTML with a lot of table base layouts and spacer GIFs and we had some JavaScript we had two competing browsers Netscape and Internet Explorer each of whom ended up adopting elements that challenged us so much.
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Internet Explorer implemented the div element for division but Netscape didn't follow along and made up its own alternative known as layer. We had one API which was the document object model which makes sense in a document based web. But we couldn't really move together easily.
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We had to figure out how to get what was come to known as Dynamic HTML or dhtml work with internet Explorer's development and the Netscape layer element. It was a brutal time because people were coming up with really cool things accessibility not so much but innovation yes.
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We saw a lot of mish-mosh from tools from developers using mixtures of CSS presentational HTML like font and colors and overwhelmingly difficult tables in order to achieve layouts along with JavaScript in competing browsers it became so overwhelming if you kids today knew haha
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As we were doing this work at the w3c was moving more into the XML space. The existential markup language is another Meadow language from which applications and subsets are made came out of us Gmail but with far more rigor still Proverbs but better markup this became xhtml. So
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More rigorous markups and creative CSS began to allow for more JavaScript to be used industry evangelist such as Jeremy Keith and others really began to think you know we want to do all this but we don't want to obfuscate content we want JavaScript to be unobtrusive
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A new time was emerging. We had strong markup and better ideas about content pause. CSS was starting to mature so we had more options there and we were getting more skilled with how we used JavaScript but kept the content open for accessibility. But there was one big problem.
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At that point Internet Explorer 6 owned the dominant space of the web. But Netscape still was important because it was being used all over especially in government and education and we had to write for both so now came the hacks and the workarounds as well as browser advocacy.
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To Microsoft's credit that a browser they made and stopped innovating on 5 years in Internet years which is what a blink of an eye had implemented some very cool things otherwise. But issues like Box model, Dom, emerging CSS options caused us nightmares.
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It's important to remember we did not have the near browser monoculture we have today back then. Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, Safari where at different implementations and doing different things in their rendering. Safari and open source projects especially allowed for
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A better open source rendering engine that eventually did become adopted by the major browsers we use now that's solved a lot of problems. The w3c began to modularize CSS which was a wonderful move because it meant implementations to be done in Cycles longer than years at a time.
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The web standards project shifted perspective as Jeffrey wanted to go back to design and other projects so myself and Steve Champeon stepped into the coal lead of the web standards project he worked on the technology and kept us moving forward well I went on a lot of ranting LOL
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Robert scoble and other people from the Microsoft environment began to listen and open up and thus began a shift along with the wonderful Chris Wilson who had been hanging in there through all of this through the web standards project 2 over 40 members with different task forces.
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One of those task forces was myself, the Visionary JavaScript developer Dean Edwards who had actually used Microsoft Technology and JavaScript to implement settings with one script call which he humorously referred to as i e 7. Microsoft invited myself @meyerweb others to come
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