HTML.co.uk

HTML History

HTML’s first version didn’t have the version number. HTML was just called as HTML. Back in 1989 to1995 HTML was used to put up some of the simple WebPages. HTML was standardized in the year 1995 by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and numbered it as “HTML 2.0”.

W3C (World Wide Web consortium) presented the next version called “HTML 3.2” in 1997, in 1998 “HTML 4.0” and in 1999 “HTML 4.01” was released. Later on W3C made an announcement that, it would not be developing new versions of HTML and it would focus on extensible XHTML or HTML. W3C recommended web designers to use HTML 4.01 for their (web designers) HTML documents.

At this point of time, development of HTML split off. W3C drew its attention on XHTML 1.0 and from 2000 onwards basics of XHTML was recommended. As web designers weren’t interested to move to rigid parts of XHTML. In 2004, WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) began to develop the new version of HTML called HTML 5 which was not as rigid as XHTML. WHATWG are hopeful that their HTML 5 version will be eventually accepted as a W3C recommendation.

Deciding which version of HTML

While writing a Webpage, the first and foremost decision is whether to write in XHTML or HTML. If a webpage designer is using an editor like dreamweaver the choice of HTML is determined by the doctype chosen. If an XHTML doctype is chosen, then the page will be written XHTML or if an HTML doctype is chosen, then the page will be written in HTML.

Now XHTML is HTML 4.0 which has been rewritten as XML application. If XHTML is written, the attributes will be quoted, tags will be closed and it could be edited in XML editor. Than XHTML, HTML is lot looser because it can leave quotes of attributes like leave tags <p> without closing </p>tag and so on.

Why HTML is used

HTML occupies lesser space, where the download speed will be higher
Response of the older browsers will be more effective to HTML than to a XHTML.
Learning HTML is an easy process because it forgives, like if the tags in HTML are left off the codes still work.

Why XHTML is used

XTML is lot clearer at the beginning and at the end by which events and styles can be added in more easily. Because XHTML is XM, it integrates well into other programming languages. Some of the browsers available respond reliably to XHTML, so that the pages are displayed consistently.

Once decided on XHTML or HTML- which of these versions should be used

HTML
In this there are 3 versions still in regular use around the net. They are:
HTML 3.2, HTML 4.0 and HTML 4.01.

XHTML
In this there are 2 versions in current use, they are:
XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 2.0.

Once decided on a version

Ensure to use a doctype. Using a doctype is one more additional line in HTML documents. By using doctype, it ensures the pages are displayed the way they are intended to be displayed

Since the last millennium HTML 5 has introduced new elements to HTML. Aside, figure and section are the new structural elements. Time, meter and progress are the new inline elements. Video and audio are the new embedding elements. Details, data grid and command are the new interactive elements.

In 1999 the development of HTML had stopped with HTML4. The world wide website consortium’s (w3c) changed its focus in the underlying syntax of HTML to XML (extensible markup language) from standard generalized markup language(SGML) and it also focused on languages like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG),X Forms and MathML. Browser features like tabs and RSS readers were focused by browser vendors. The languages like CSS and JavaScript came in handy to the web designers to build their own applications on top of the existing frame work using Asynchronous XML (Ajax) + JavaScript, but in the next eight years HTML grew itself very hardly.

Recently the 3 browser vendor major’s – Apple, Opera and Mozilla foundation came together as the web hypertext application technology working group(whatwg) to develop the classic version of HTML to an updated and upgraded version. With Same members, w3c started developing its own upgraded version of HTML taking note of the developments of the three major browser vendors. These two upgraded versions are likely to be merged, but many details are left to be argued, the next version of HTML outlines is becoming clear.

HTML5 the new version of HTML known usually, though it goes under the name web application1.0, it is recognizable by a web designer frozen in the year 1999 and today thawed. It includes no namespaces and schemas. Elements need not be closed. Errors will be forgiven by browsers. Desk is still a desk and TV is still a TV.

At the same moment some new and confusing elements would encountered by the unfrozen caveman Web designer. Now HTML includes new elements like section, header, footer, and nav with old elements like div.But now it includes audio and video and also em,code and strong are still present with meter, time, and m. img and embed which are continued to be used. Closer inspection by caveman designer however would reveal that all these elements are not different. Back in 1999 the designer might have needed these things, but wasn’t developed. The designer can understand all these new elements by simple analogy where he might have learned earlier. Than Ajax or CSS it is lot easier to learn.

At last, laptop running on windows 98 with 300 MHz was fired by caveman which was frozen way back in 1999, they might have astonished to know that the display of the new pages are fine in Netscape 4 and Windows® Internet Explorer® 5. Page still displays and all the contents are present, and the browser does anything or wouldn’t recognize with new elements.

It’s not a happy feature, HTML was designed explicitly to degrade browsers gracefully that won’t support it. The reason behind this is simple, as we all are cave people. Browsers now have XmlHttpRequest, tabs and CSS, but in 1999 their renderers of HTML stuck. Without accounting the installed base, web cannot move forward and HTML5 understands it.

Content Management is being used for a variety of reasons these days. Most of the companies are looking at the option of content management mainly because they are looking out for a way to either manage their content or get it managed. But the use and the advantages of CMS or content management system are not just restricted or limited to management of data or template web delivery. The primary reason till date for using CMS is that it can be used for managing the content on the website and most of the content management systems make use of XML for tagging the database and the content connectivity.

Many of the content management systems are capable of providing the ability to the content managers to validate as well as approve the content before it is actually put on to the web. They can even control the day and the time that a content element would go live. Content management system also helps in web templating. Web pages can easily be created by the templates thereby allowing the content developers to just concentrate on the writing of the content. Once the content is ready to be displayed on the web site, the content just has to be uploaded in the templates and the content will be automatically be displayed with the standardized branding of your website.

Content management system also helps in personalisation. Once you have uploaded the content on to your content management system, it becomes quite very easy create personalized web pages for the visitors of your web site. This is made possible as the content management has draws a solid line between the content and the web site design. Therefore, it becomes quite simple to deliver the content the way it has been requested by the reader. Content management system is also of great help to syndication.

Syndication allows the user to share its web site content with other companies. Similar to personalisation, both the content and the web design are separate entities in syndication as well. For example, an online vitamin store might be interested in syndicating the articles on vitamins; similarly Symantec might be interested in content related to online security. You being the copyright owner of the content, it becomes your prime duty to provide high quality content whether it is writing audio or video. Content management system is capable of providing the background so that you can manage the rights of you content.

Therefore, it is very important that all the companies make use of CMS or content management system for managing their regular day to day activities. Content management system, as we all know provides all its users with simple and easy ways and methods of managing your web content and at the same time personalizing and syndicating your web content.

Since its evolution in 1994, the most impressive web developer language VRML has been through a lots of modifications and upgrades. In the year 1997, VRML was upgraded for the first time and its name was changed from VRML94 to VRML97 (which is also known as VRML2 or VRML 2.0). This upgraded version of the web language became an ISO standard and was used to design home pages and sites offering 3D chat facilities.

As the web graphics and vectors began to improve, a lot of alternate languages emerged in order to provide better options for virtual 3D modeling and stood in the competition. The various alternatives to the traditional VRML language are:

A) COLLADA: It stands for COLLAborative Design Activity for developing interchangeable file format for 3D applications. This language defines an open standard XML schema which lays down the standards for exchanging the digital files among a number of graphic software applications.

COLLADA documents use XML files having a .dae (digital asset exchange) extension. This language was originally produced to facilitate transfer of digital data from one digital content creation tool to another DCC. This language is used by a number of popular applications such as Maya, 3D Studio Max, Google Earth etc.

B) U3D: Short for Universal 3D, U3D represents the compressed file format for 3D data. It was developed to get a universal standard for exchanging all types of 3D data.

C) X3D: It is a successor of VRML which was developed to enhance the VRML capabilities. X3D features various extensions to VRML such as Humanoid Animation, NURBS, GoeVRML etc. X3D defines a large number of extensions which are used for various purposes. Some of the popular X3D extensions are X3D Core, X3D Interchange, X3D CAD, X3D Geospatial and X3D Immersive.

D) 3DMLW: It is short for 3D Markup Language for Web. This is an XML based standard file format which is used for representing both three dimensional as well as two dimensional interactive content on the World Wide Web. 3DMLW is an open source engine and is licensed under GPL (General Public License).

In order to view and ripe the amazing benefits of 3DMLW, a 3DMLW plug-in or a 3DMLW standalone web browser has to be installed on the PC. The plug-in renders the 3D and 2D effects using the OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) standard. Thus it can be used under cross language, cross platform environments.

3DMLW separated the 2D and 3D objects and uses a text file format based on the XML 1.0 standard.

All the different 3D applications and graphic standards have their own abilities and disabilities. Therefore, one should keep in mind the objective of using these applications, the features of the applications, the cost and scalability factor while choosing one of them. You can also use more than one application and standard simultaneously to have a larger pool of exciting features as most of them supports cross platform functionality as well as backward compatibility.

Since its evolution, the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) has been revised and upgraded a number of times in order to make the World Wide Web a better place to live virtually. HTML is a derivative of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), but its major flaw is that it is not extensible. Thus HTML is not appropriate for deployment under a network environment.

So, the World Wide Web Consortium (popularly known as W3C) decided to develop a new breed of extensible language and came up with XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language. Web developers use XML to dynamically describe the information stored on a web page. Though XML, the new generation web pages describes themselves which is helpful to gain good rankings in search engine listings and help the developers to write codes for custom search tools.

• XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
• XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
• XML shall be compatible with SGML.
• It shall be easy to write programs that process XML documents.
• The number of optional features shall be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
• XML documents shall be human-legible and reasonably clear.
• The XML design should be prepared quickly.
• The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
• XML documents shall be easy to create.
• Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

(Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/)

XML is referred as a Metalanguage which describes other languages. It is called so because XML allows the web developers to create documents which describes themselves to their reader. Though the XML tags look like the HTML ones, the main difference between the two is that the HTML documents do not tell the web browser how to display the web page. On the other hand, the XML documents are downloaded by the web browser along with a style sheet or Document Type definition (DTD) which guides the web browser on how to display the web page.

In its raw form, an XML document looks like the HTML and SGML documents, but all are functionally different. The main difference between the HTML and XML coding is that the XML tags are very rigid. For example; the HTML language has tags which have a closing and which don’t have a closing section. But in XML either all the tags must exist in pair or announce to the reader that a closing tag is not present.

For example: in HTML you can use <BR> tag without having to close it, but in XML you have to use it as <BR>…</BR> or simply as <BR/> which announces that there is no closing tag for BR.

Another prominent difference between the two languages is that the XML requires all the tag attribute values to be enclosed within quotation marks. For example:

<font color=red>……</font>, this is wrong in XML. It should be like <font color=”red”>…….</font>

HTML can be classified into two categories namely SGML based HTML (traditional) pitted against XML based HTML (also called XHTML) and the second one being a strict versus transitional versus frameset. In this article, the former has been described in detail.

One notable difference between the traditional version and XHTML is the technical distinction between the two of them. However, Inspite of all the modifications being done, the root element name “HTML” has been kept the same. The area which requires loads of effort is the one where the limitations of XML start showing in comparison to the more complex SGML inspite of the W3C intended HTML 4.01 being identical to XHTML 1.0. Due to the similarity quotient between HTML and XHTML, they are documented in parallel at many times.

The difference between an XHTML 1.0 document and an HTML 4.01 document is mostly syntactic in each of the corresponding DTDs except for the different opening declarations applicable for the document. There are many shortcuts which XHTML does not allow but HTML allows because of the underlying syntax. Be it elements with optional opening or closing tags, empty elements not having an end tag, all these are examples of the shortcuts that a user can take advantage of in HTML. HTML requires all elements to have an opening tag or a closing tag.

After contemplating on the whole process, the developers of XHTML have also come out with a shortcut. The opening and closing of an HTML tag has to be done within the same tag but a slash (/) can be added before the closing of the tag. For demonstration of the concept, let us take this example: <avi/>, where “<” is the opening tag and “>” the closing tag, “avi” is a fictitious HTML tag and as mentioned above, the slash (/) comes before the tag is closed.

To properly understand the minute differences between HTML and XHTML, the tips listed below need to be kept in mind:

. XHTML makes use of XML’s built in language defining functionality attribute. The language for an element should be specified with a lang attribute rather than the XHTML attribute.
. The XML namespace has to be removed as HTML does not have a provision for namespaces.
. The document type declaration has to be changed from XHTML 1.0 to HTML 4.01.
. The empty-element syntax of an XML has to be developed into a style empty element of an HTML.

A technically well constructed XHTML document will always follow all the syntax requirements of XML. The structure of a document is thoroughly described by the content of XHTML and legitimate documents will religiously follow its specified data.

To migrate easily between HTML and XHTML, several conventions have been recommended by the W3C and by meticulously following these guidelines, a user will be able to easily interpret the document as HTML or XHTML. The XHTML 1.0 documents that have been made compatible in this way are permitted by the W3C to be served either as HTML or as XHTML.