- by Dave Foster

Copyright © Dave Foster – All Rights Reserved

http://www.soloprofits.com

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A lot of people ask me how multimedia fits in with the WWW.

Well, it is the next logical progression in this amazing phenomenon we
call the Internet, which didn’t actually exist (as we know it) 12 or so
years ago. The damned thing wasn’t even invented until 1989… here’s a
crash history.

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. In 1989, Tim was working in
a computing services section of CERN when he came up with the concept
(web); at the time he had no idea that it would be implemented on such
an enormous scale. Particle physics research often involves
collaboration among institutes from all over the world. Tim had the idea
of enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and
pool together information. But far from simply making available a large
number of research documents as files that could be downloaded to
individual computers; he suggested that you could actually link the text
in the files themselves.

In other words, there could be cross-references from one research paper
to another. This would mean that while reading one research paper, you
could quickly display part of another paper that holds directly relevant
text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific and mathematical nature
would thus be represented as a ‘web’ of information held in electronic
form on computers across the world. This, Tim thought, could be done by
using some form of hypertext, some way of linking documents together by
using buttons on the screen, which you simply clicked on to jump from
one paper to another.

Tim’s simple but effective idea turned out to be the greatest
communication device of humanity even if it was not supported by big
companies and manufacturers. For instance, Hewlett-Packard, in common
with many other large computer companies, was quite unconvinced that the
Internet would be a success; indeed, the need for a global hypertext
system simply passed them by. For many large corporations, the question
of whether or not any money could be made from the Web was unclear from
the outset.

Later, especially after Mosaic, the first web browser was released; the
competition between the companies became more obvious. The later version
of Mosaic in competition with the Microsoft Internet Explorer added new
features to the HTML language like n-compass and active-x controls
respectively. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium was formed to
fulfill the potential of the Web through the development of open
standards. They had a strong interest in HTML. Just as an orchestra
insisting on the best musicians, the consortium recruited many of the
best-known names in the Web community headed up by Tim Berners-Lee.
During 1995, all kinds of new HTML tags emerged. Some, like the BGCOLOR
attribute of the BODY element and FONT FACE, which control stylistic
aspects of a document, found themselves in the black books of the
academic engineering community. “You’re not supposed to be able to do
things like that in HTML,” they would protest. In the end, the
technology of web was for the pure purpose of science and technology. It
was not supposed to turn into a multimedia “tool”. It was their belief
that such things as text color, background texture, font size and font
face were definitely outside the scope of a language when their only
intent was to specify how a document would be organized.

While the W3 Consortium was working on already the HTML 3, the web
design was benefiting the competition between the Netscape and IE. Even
for the good intentions of the consortium, the big corporations insisted
on creating their own derivatives for HTML. This was creating many
compatibility problems. Finally, following the success of the November,
1995 meeting, the World Wide Web Consortium formed the HTML Editorial
Review Board to help with the standardization process. This board
consisted of representatives from IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell,
Softquad and the W3 Consortium, and did its business via telephone
conference and email exchanges, meeting approximately once every three
months. Its aim was to collaborate and agree upon a common standard for
HTML, thus putting an end to the era when browsers each implemented a
different subset of the language. The bad fairy of incompatibility was
to be banished from the HTML kingdom forever, or one could hope so,
perhaps.

The incompatibility was not banished but was at least minimized.
However, HTML kept on growing and the last versions like the dynamic
HTML, like HTML 4.0 brought new colors and usages for this language.
Especially after the edition of style sheets, it became extremely
difficult to standardize the view of a web page depending on the browser
you use.

As you can see, HTML was written for the pure purpose of information
sharing but turned into a mass communication mechanism. It was supposed
to be an organizational language, and yet became a multimedia source
where you can edit the layout and add images, sound and many other
multimedia files. We can blame the evolution process of this language
for the non-standardized nature of it.

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Dave Foster owns and operates the “Solo Profits” blog and podcast,
guiding individual entrepreneurs and home-based business owners to
online success using audio, video and multimedia techniques. Dave
also explores the virgin territory of multimedia psychology and how
to present your message effectively through these new communications
channels.

Want to discover more? Go To ==>> http://www.soloprofits.com

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