Introduction and background 13 The World Wide Web (WWW) Abbreviations and emoticons Because of the need to conserve bandwidth, and for speed of typing, many abbreviations are in common use. Here are a few you may encounter: While a consultant for CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in 1980, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a hypertext- based program called `Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything'. In 1990, he coined the name World Wide Web (WWW) and, with Robert Cailliau as co-author, he developed the first WWW program. In 1993, CERN placed this software in the public domain. That same year, a group of graduate students from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana developed Mosaic, a software package that used the WWW protocol. Mosaic was a major factor in the explosion of business interest on the internet, because it made the internet accessible to inexperienced users. Many other browsers have evolved since Mosaic's development, including its direct descendant Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The World Wide Web is a huge collection of interconnected pages. Many sites encourage or require you to register (giving them valuable marketing information). Your ISP or college may provide you with disk space on their server for a home page and there are many sites around the world that offer free space. These can be used as test areas to develop your web design skills. The WWW is based on a client­server model where the client (your browser) communicates with the servers (the sites storing the web pages you want to view) using mainly HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol). HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is used to create and communicate the page. The address of a page, or its URL (Uniform Resource Locator), is generally of the form: http://www.yourisp.com/username/ index.html. Technically, the `www' part of the URL is a subdomain, and as such could be anything you choose: `www1' and `www2', for example, are used by large organizations to share traffic among different servers. The `www' at present distinguishes a web address from, say, an FTP address (see page 17), but is largely redundant and you will see more and more websites abandoning it in the future. Try typing in your URL without the `www' and it will probably work just as well. BTW FYI IMHO LOL RT*M by the way for your information in my humble opinion laugh out loud read the * manual (clean version!) Web standards What are standards and why are they important? Without standard weights and measurements everyday life would be chaos and the mass-production of goods impossible. Time was standardized when the users of railways demanded accurate timetables. So it is with web standards ­ they ensure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. And because gestures or inflections of speech are impossible on the net, symbols made from text characters, called emoticons or smileys, have evolved. These are particularly useful to avoid causing offence ­ your harmless joke may be taken literally, but a ;-) smiley makes everything okay! The most common are opposite (turn your head 90 degrees to the left).