by Hayesha somarathna

This is my first article on the series of “Let’s Follow Web Standards”. From this issue onwards I’m going to focus your attention on the key areas that you should keep in mind while working with Web development work. Before looking into its technical aspects let’s explore bit into its history to get some understanding of how things got started and evolved to present status.

Bit about History

During the latter part of 1980s the World Wide Web (WWW) got originated in a place where we would least think of. It was CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.  It was Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the concept of World Wide Web during 1989. He was a fellow at CERN where he put into practice of his expertise knowledge working under the Computing division. It was this time that he came up with this idea of WWW, and he also would not have though that his concept could have done such a big impact to the human society. His concept drives us into a new dimension with a phenomenal change in all aspects of our life.  

 Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of providing a means of organizing and to pool together the information among researchers from remote locations. It was far from just make available a pool of collection of research publications which can be downloaded to individual computers. Instead his suggestion was to actually keep a link to respective documents in the file itself. In other words, maintaining internal links from one research publication to another. His effort was to come up with a mechanism that enables the readers of research publications to easily navigate to the respective research article which holds the original and elaborated explanation including diagrams, figures, etc. His concept provides a way to transform the documentation of scientific and mathematical knowledge (resources) into a pool of interconnected knowledge network in the means of electronic form which can be easily accessed through computers scattered around the world. Initially the Sir Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of achieving this by making use of some form of hypertext, to incorporate a link from the document to the original resource by a means of clicking on some particular entity to jump from one document to another.

 While he was working at CERN during 1980 he built a prototype system called “Enquire'” to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. He make use of the same principles used in “Enquire'” to create the WWW, along with the Web browser, editor and the first Web server called “CERN HTTPd” for necessary communication. He demonstrated the feasibility of publishing the text in electronic form having the facility of retrieving other text files via hypertext links using the NeXT workstation. In this process he used his own simple protocol called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and the text format used in HTTP was called HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). Today we are using same this same HTML having support for more media types, such as voice, video, images, etc. 

What is HTML?

 Let’s dig little bit deeper into HTML to understand its basics. Standard Generalized Mark-up Language or simply called as SGML was an internationally accepted standard for marking up text into structural units such as paragraphs, headings, list items and so on.  Since it had clearly defined procedures derivatives of SGML could be implemented on any machine to fulfill the exact purpose. The main idea behind SGML was to make the language independent form the formatter (the browser agent or other viewing software) which actually displayed the text on the screen. This was achieved in HTML by use of pairs of tags such as <TABLE> and </TABLE>, <P> and </P> to represent the required information on the pages.

Inception of Internet

 During the 90s the American Depart of Defense releases the Internet to be used by general public which was started under DARPA project. At the initial stage it usage got limited among the researches and academic communities. Gradually the community grew into billions of users around the word and today it has been a part of our everyday life.

 Due to this rapid growth, people felt the real requirement of adhering to a common set of standards while publishing the content on the Web. The initial users of the Web used it mostly for sharing and publishing articles. In most cases the contents of these articles got limited to diagrams, tables and images other than text. The requirement of having to display feature rich content (incorporation of multimedia) into Web pages didn’t felt by the users until end of 90s due to the lack of its popularity, high cost and lower data transfer rate. As the dawn of the new millennium more users saw its potential and the benefits that can be achieved through it, especially among the business community. With the entering of the business community the WWW got a big boost. It was this era that the present giants of WWW such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Ebay, etc entered into Internet business just finishing their undergraduate studies.

 The beginning of the millennium turned the face of most business ventures from pure brick and motor into click and motor organizations. This phenomenal change generated new opportunities around the world by bridging the border of countries and making it a one big global community where people from different geographical locations got the chance to express and share ideas, provided a meeting place for people with common interests, do business, exchange information, get to know various people, to understand different cultures, etc.

Requirement of a Global Standard

 This phenomenal change in the usage of Web by the world community created many requirements to be handled by a simple HTML page. It saw not an easy task to cater for every part of that, so new technologies were invented and new methods were tried to fulfill this ever mounting requirements of users. To handle this complexity the early contributors of the WWW got together to layout a solid foundation. They set up an international vendor neutral consortium to come up with set of guidelines covering most aspects of the user requirements as well as technology requirements lead by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and leading industry experts. This was called the World Wide Web Consortium or simply called as W3C.

 According to W3Cs official web site “Its  primarily focus was on the creation of Web standards and guidelines. Since 1994, W3C has published more than 110 such standards, called W3C Recommendations. In order for the Web to reach its full potential, the most fundamental Web technologies must be compatible with one another and allow any hardware and software used to access the Web to work together. W3C refers to this goal as Web interoperability. By publishing open (non- proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols, W3C seeks to avoid market fragmentation and thus Web fragmentation.” In pursuit of its mission the W3C has a set of clearly defined goals for creating a single World Wide Web.

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

• Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG).

• Web content developers (page authors, site designers, etc.)

• Others who want a technical standard for Web accessibility

• Designing authoring tools that produce accessible Web content

• Creating an accessible authoring interface.