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The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) has been around since the early 1990s. My earliest encounter
was somewhere around 1993 or 1994, when I was working at a university research lab not far from
London. There was only one browser—NCSA Mosaic—and the number of web servers could be counted
on one hand.
When I think back to those days, I wonder why we were so excited about HTML and the World Wide
Web. (We had to laboriously type all three words in those days. There wasn’t the critical mass or current
sense of importance to refer to just “the Web.”
Everything was very basic. I remember some images of gemstones that we could watch load...slowly.
This was before the broadband revolution and the entire university had the kind of bandwidth that is
common on a mobile phone these days. But we were excited. Grant proposals were hurriedly rewritten
to embrace the new world, and there was a real sense that the world of technology had fractured into
before-Web and after-Web periods, even if all we could do was see pictures of a coffee pot in another
university not far from London (but too far to go for coffee).
Since then, the Web has become indistinguishable from the Internet for many users and we are long
past the point of being excited about pictures of gems. Along the way, HTML has been extended,
enhanced, twisted, tortured, fought over, litigated over, ignored, embraced, denigrated for being too
simple, hailed as being the future and, ultimately, settling into its current position as part of the
indispensable plumbing in the daily lives of billions of people.
This book is about HTML5—the latest version of the HTML standard and an attempt to bring order,
structure, and enhancement to a critical technology that has finally matured after years of difficult
adolescence.
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