The quest for structured markup

The 1980s

• Transition from paper (printing) to electronic medium (disk, CDROM);

• drop in cost, and hence ubiquity of the PC;

• enormous increase of data volume (dictionaries, telephone directories, legal texts, image data banks);

• increase in the cost to store and maintain (keep up-to-date) the information;

• old systems were optimised to print or visualise (WYSIWYG);

• there was a clear need to better structure the information.

The birth of SGML

• Documents that are marked up in a structured way can be more easily exchanged and manipulated if they adhere to an open standard;

• Gencode (GCA) and GML (IBM) were in the nineteen seventies precursors of a generic markup language;

• based on the experience gained with GML ANSI, and then ISO in 1986 adopted the SGML standard (ISO:8879, 1986);

• SGML is quite a complex standard and needs non-trivial resources to get going (training, expensive software);

• thus very long SGML's deployment was limited to large companies, government agencies and institutions.

Then HTML took the world by storm

• Since the late 1980s the importance of the Internet in communication has exploded exponentially: TCP/IP was (and still is) its lingua franca and e-mail, telnet and ftp the main user-level applications;

• in 1989/90 at CERN there was a real need to give and get access to documents in a transparent and location-independent way;

• thanks to its Mac/NeXT culture (simple, rich, and user-friendly interface) Tim Berners-Lee (an Oxford graduate) and collaborators coined the three basic ideas of the Web:

  1. Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP): communication between WWW servers;

  2. Uniform Resource Locator (URL): location-independent addressing scheme for resources on the Web;

  3. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): the markup language.

• This mini Web (in 1991 there are only 10 Web servers in the world!_) was a nice toy during the years 1990-1994, especially when you had access to a Mac or Next computer.

• However, a killer application was needed to get the Web out of the lab. It was Marc Andreessen and Co with their Mosaic who provided a nicely integrated graphic user interface to the who got the Web ball rolling;

• in May 1994 at CERN the First WWW Conference was organised (the so called Woodstock of the Web) and since then the number of Web users and servers has increased into the millions.

• The W3 Consortium (MIT, Inria, Keio) was set up in 1994-1995.

• Many applications appeared (Netscape, Internet Explorer) and the rest is history.