Open Standards

The Web is built on Open Standards. Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist working at CERN, the European Particle Physics lab, came up with HTML and HTTP, and gave them freely to the world. Previous attempts at hypertext had been hamstrung by difficult authoring interfaces and closed, proprietary standards. The fact that the specifications for HTTP and HTML were freely available meant that anyone could write a web browser or a web site without paying license fees. Boom!

The Separation of Content and Presentation

The original idea went like this: web authors would make content available. Then users would decide for themselves how they wanted it presented. In the earliest web browsers, all control of how things looked resided with the user. Authors could not even specify the background colour of a web page.

The problem was that authors wanted to have some measure of control over how their content would be presented. Commercial browser companies such as Netscape (which had spun off from CERN's own Mosaic browser) started to add non-standard tags, so that authors could specify colours, control layout of images, and so on. The announcement that Netscape would support a <CENTER> tag was greeted with much fanfare. The <BLINK> tag was followed by resounding boos. Other browser companies started supporting the non-standard tags as well, so as not to be left behind.

Some of these new tags were accepted as part of the next version of HTML, and some were not. HTML started to become a compromise between the ideal of content/presentation separation, and the reality of an unreliable, non-standard page-layout paradigm.

Things got pretty ugly for a while, but fortunately now is a good time to make a website, because a lot of it's been sorted out.

The magic of Cascading Style Sheets >>>