Slide 1:
Hello again, and welcome to COM 333, “Communicating Through Internet.”  This, lecture number 12, “HyperText Markup Language”.

Slide 2:
Well, I think we’ve all heard about HTML, HyperText Markup Language.  It is really the cornerstone of the web.  It’s what the web is built out of.  It really is the foundation.  And it began in 1991-92, and actually, spreading into 1993, when Tim Berners-Lee began the development of HTML.  At the same time, Marc Andreesen was developing Mosaic at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.  These two components, Mosaic, the original graphical browser for the web, and HTML, the coding process to make text and images viewable through such a browser, together have created a revolution.  The Internet, which had existed for two decades previously, had always been available - largely for geeks and nerds.  That is, you really had to know a good bit about Unix, Unix commands, operating systems, and you had to bring up multiple software applications in order to view material that had been transferred over the Internet.

Slide 3:
Well, SGML led to HTML.  Tim Berners-Lee began with a mark-up language.  That is, the Standard Generalized Markup Language, that had existed for decades.  It was the mark-up code that had been used by printers for print publications for many, many years, and he adapted this coding to electronic presentation.  The intent was to allow formatting of text - that is, to allow for italics, and bold, and to center text, and move it around, etc., and also to provide for graphic layouts to display images along with text.  Now, this HTML has been revised again, again, and again - with multiple versions coming out with HTML 1 and then 2, and 3, and 3.2, and 4, and on, and on, and on.  These continuous revisions then [were] approved by the W3 consortium.

Slide 4:
In the basics of HTML, this involves setting tags or commands inside of those pointy brackets, those less than and greater than signs, so commands such as center, or body, or HTML itself, would be placed between these brackets and would then set these as commands to be executed by the software browser.  Commands surround either text to which they apply, or identify objects to which they apply, and those commands then are turned off using the forward slash mark.  Commands continue to be refined and, as we said, there are newer versions every year - and among those versions now are style sheets, which allow multiple options in appearance to be set just by establishing one line of code early on in your coding, in your HTML, and it can apply to the color then, you can apply color to your text and the text font, and the way in which things are displayed on your entire document.  And you can do that all by referring to a style sheet, so that you don’t have to put quite so many commands into your HTML coding as you did previously.

Slide 5:
Well, the best way to find out how this all works is really to take a look at code -- and one of the nice features still in browsers is that you can click on the “View” option at the top of your browser and then in the drop-down menu choose “Page Source” and that way you can view the actual coding for that page.  You can see the HTML commands, the tags, and all the entries for that particular page, and so you can see how the coding relates to the actual display of the page.  Now there are many editors, that is, software packages, that ease the process of coding -- rather than typing-in these commands by hand, although I hasten to add that many expert HTML editors do code by-hand, that is, they type-in every command themselves and they really don’t use one of these editing packages.  But among the very popular ones are Microsoft FrontPage, Allaire’s Cold Fusion, and even the free Netscape Composer.  Composer comes packaged with the Communicator Netscape product.

Slide 6:
XML, Extensible Mark Up Language, is a whole new level for the display and coding of displays on the Internet.  This is the system for defining other languages, if you will, within HTML.  Tags can now contain content, not just structures.  It allows you to put information into your tags or commands, not just saying, “Oh, this should be italicized,” rather, you can put actual content into the tags.  And this will allow for more effective web design; coding now gets to become smart.  The coding itself is able to bring up database kinds of information.  This will certainly promote e-commerce applications on the Internet  - and XML is supported by Internet Explorer 4.0 and above and Netscape 5.0 and above.

Slide 7:
SMIL, I didn’t actually forget the E, it’s SMIL, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language.  This new language, which was approved in 1998 by the W3 Consortium, allows image, text, and animation integrations on the web.  It brings television kinds of capabilities to the web.  I think that it will result in more multimedia applications being displayed through the Internet, and certainly more graphical applications, and much more interaction on the web.

Slide 8:
Well, you can have a home on the web.  That is a homepage for free.  It’s a relatively new phenomenon on the Internet that many providers are offering -- free web space for home pages.  Commonly, these involve some sort of advertising, commonly packaged with an e-mail box, which again allows for a good display of advertising.  So these ad-supported sites allow you several megabytes, up to unlimited, 900 megabytes of space, to put up a web page.  And you can check out the range of providers by going to the address listed here: http://www.freewebspace.net.  You can create your own web page if you like, and a many of these sites include online editors; others allow you to FTP the source code from your computer.

Slide 9:
Well, in conclusion, HTML was begun by Tim Berners-Lee.  It’s really not a static phenomenon; rather it’s under constant revision.  And it has lead to Extensible Markup Language and SMIL.  You, too, can start generating your own homepage and, in fact, generate web pages for others - and you can do that for free.  Drop by the WebBoard this week and join in our conversation -- and I look forward to seeing you on the Internet.