the evolution of the web

I have been involved with web sites for a very long time. I acquired my domain csquared.com in 1996 and immediately started creating a web site. I have worked with web sites in one form or another ever since then.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is the language used to create web pages and web sites. Standards for HTML are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short. You can find their web site at w3c.org. While the basics of HTML are unchanged, the standard has evolved to allow for the creation of more powerful and useful web sites. The current standard is HTML5, along with CSS3. CSS stands for cascading style sheet. Cascading Style Sheets provide the formatting for web pages.

Most web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) do a great job of maintaining backward compatibility, so you can continue to create web pages using older versions of HTML and the page will display properly. But you are missing out on a lot of functionality when you do. HTML5 and CSS3 also provide the framework for more efficient and logically structured code.

When my corporate career ended and I started looking at the world of freelancing I began taking online courses on HTML5 and CSS3. I was astonished at how much more powerful, efficient, and elegant the current standard is compared to the older version I had kept using out of habit and laziness. (The HTML reference manual that still sits on my shelf covers version 4.01 and has a copyright date of 2001.) You can learn about HTML5 and CSS3 on online learning sites like udemy, udacity, and edx.

Of course, you may not need these skills at all. Companies are popping up that allow you to create beautiful web sites with no knowledge of HTML and CSS. I'll talk about those next week.