Introduction

While working for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), Tim Burners-Lee proposed bringing the ideas of hyper-text documents together with emerging Internet technologies like the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Domain Name System (DNS) to create the World-Wide Web. He defined the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the first web server, and the first web browser, in 1990 demonstrating the feasibility of the idea. Since that time, the web has grown to contain around 1.7 billion webpages¹.

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.
-Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Burners-Lee went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to continue developing and maintaining web standards. He has been the recipient of numerous prestigious international awards and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004 for his contributions to society.

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.

Why Standards?

The Web Standards the W3C and ECMA International maintain are a critical piece of the web infrastructure. Having a standard for how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript should be interpreted by a web browser means that every browser can display the same webpage in the same way - allowing you the choice of your favorite browser without worrying your web browsing experience would be impacted.

This was not always the case; during the early days of the world-wide-web in a period known as the Browser Wars the browsers Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both added features to their browsers not defined in the standards, and web developers had to decide which browser to build against.

Even after that point, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer did not adopt the full standards, forcing web developers to build their web pages to display in a standards-compliant browser (like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari), then modify their design to work within Internet Explorer. Thankfully, even Microsoft grew frustrated with maintaining the non-compliant Internet Explorer, and replaced it with Microsoft Edge.

The web standards also provide a mechanism for adding new features. The approach involves all stakeholders in the process, and allows browser manufacturers to add “experimental” features so that new ideas can be tried out before being adopted. In fact, browser manufacturers often adopt different approaches to a potential feature, allowing for a comparison before a final standard is adopted.

Summary

This textbook will guide you through the three core client-side web technologies (HTML, CSS, & JS), as well as discuss the role HTTP plays in retrieving resources for a web client (like a browser) from the web. It is organized into chapters focused on each of those technologies in turn:

1. The World-Wide-Web
2. Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol
3. Hyper-Text Markup Language
4. Cascading Style Sheets
5. JavaScript

Once you understand client-side web technologies, you may want to turn your attention to the server side. The follow up textbook to this one covers those topics: Full Stack Web Development