Raven’s Eye Design

The Internet is a living thing with a tumultuous evolution behind it. In its early days, there was text. And links. And structure around that text, such as headlines, paragraphs and lists. That’s all.

The geeks who first developed the mechanism beneath the hood of web pages-HTML code, mostly-did not do so with pretty-looking pages in mind. They cleverly devised a way to make reading material available on any computer connected the Internet, and created hyperlinks, which make it possible to jump quickly from one web page to another.

A web browser, basically, is a software application that interprets the HTML code underlying a web page and shows us what the web designer who created that page wants us to see. The earliest browsers simply showed black text on white, with bold headlines and a bit of space between paragraphs.

Once masses of people started enjoying the Internet through the World Wide Web, a browser maker called Netscape devised a plan to get more people to use its browser: it offered colors on web pages. Special codes were offered to web designers that the Netscape browser would then interpret to show web pages in full color.

Microsoft, with its Internet Explorer browser, shot back offering more features in its next version. The dominant browser makers parried back and forth this way, each offering new features to make web pages look better, display images, perform interactive behaviors, and so forth, which each new version.

This natural evolution of the way web pages were designed and displayed was messy. There was no standard way in which any particular browser would interpret the HTML on a given web page. So, web designers-at the expense of their clients-often had to create several different versions of each page in order to make things work on the different browsers.

Grassroots geeks to the rescue

The Internet was eating itself, in a sense, and a group of web developers devised a plan to try to save it. They created the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is an organization that consists of all the major players with stakes in the Internet game. That includes all the major browser manufacturers and web design software makers, among others.

Now, representatives from Microsoft, Netscape, Adobe and others sat down together and hashed out a set of standard ways in which all browsers would ideally interpret HTML.

In addition, they created a whole new system to give designers control over the look of web pages. They called this system Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and it really is the biggest boon to web designers since the creation of the Web itself.

These standards were released in the mid-1990s. But because it takes a long time for a majority of people who use browsers to upgrade to the next version-and because versions 4 or lower of most popular browsers did not interpret the standards-based stuff very well-it didn’t become practical for designers to use these great new tools until 2001 or so. Millions of web designers still haven’t learned to use them to this day.

It’s important to develop standards-based websites, because they work more smoothly and efficiently in modern browsers, they’re more likely to keep functioning well in future browser versions, they’re more accessible, and they’re more efficient to create.