The Vision of Sir Tim Berners Lee

When Tim-Berners Lee presented his original ideas for the World-Wide Web, it consisted of a protocol for requesting web documents - HTTP, and a markup language those documents could be written in - HTML. These initial technologies continue to be the foundation of the world-wide web, and have been enhanced by additional languages to style webpages - CSS - and modify them - JavaScript.

Each of these technologies has continued to evolve under the guidance of the W3C. As of this writing, HTTP is in its 2nd version, HTML is in its 5th, CSS is in its 4th, and JavaScript is in its 7th. Each of these technologies is explored in its own chapter of the book.

The full standards for each can be found in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) organization’s website www.w3c.org, with the exception of JavaScript, which uses the ECMAScript standard maintained by ECMA International.

Great developer support is offered on each through the Mozilla Developer Network developer.mozilla.org. While originally the official documentation for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, Microsoft partnered with MDN as the official documentation source for their Edge browser. Additionally, MDN documents how the Safari, Opera, and IE browsers support the web standards, making it a great reference for a web developer.