HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Chapter 1. HTML, XHTML, and the World Wide Web

Though it began as a military experiment and spent its adolescence as a sandbox for academics and eccentrics, in less than a decade just before the new millennium, the worldwide network of computer networks (a.k.a. the Internet) matured into a highly diversified, financially important community of computer users and information vendors. From the boardroom to your living room, you can bump into Internet users of nearly any and all nationalities, of any and all persuasions, from serious to frivolous individuals, from businesses to nonprofit organizations, and from born-again Christian evangelists to pornographers.

In many ways, the Web—the open community of hypertext-enabled document servers and readers on the Internet—is responsible for the meteoric rise in the network's popularity. You, too, can become a valued member by contributing: writing HTML and XHTML documents and then making them available to web surfers worldwide.

Let's climb up the Internet family tree to gain some deeper insight into its magnificence, not only as an exercise of curiosity, but also to help us better understand just who and what we are dealing with when we go online.

The Internet

Although popular media accounts are often confused and confusing, the concept of the Internet really is rather simple: it's a worldwide collection of computer networks—a network of networks—sharing digital information via a common set of networking and software protocols.

Networks are ...