Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

A Bumpy Beginning

The Web was subject to the same development process as any other Internet protocol. The problem was that the explosion of excitement and opportunism of the early Web caused the development of HTML and other technologies to outpace the traditional rate of standards approval. So while the W3C began working on HTML standards in 1994, the browser software companies didn’t wait for them.

To gain control of the browser market, the Netscape browser popped up on the scene with its own set of proprietary HTML tags that vastly improved the appearance of web pages. Microsoft eventually responded with its own set of tags and features to compete with Netscape, and thus the Browser Wars were born. Both companies are guilty of give-the-people-what-they-want mentality with little regard for how that would impact the medium in the long term. The problem only got worse as web design grew beyond simple HTML to encompass richer web technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and DHTML.

As a result, we have inherited a slew of tags and technologies that work only in one browser or another as well as elements (<font> being the most notorious) that do nothing to describe the structure of the document. This flew in the face of the original intent of HTML: to describe the structure of a document’s contents, not its visual presentation. While web standards are better established now, the W3C is still compensating for years’ worth of bogus code still in use.

It didn’t take long ...