C H A P T E R  1

Putting HTML5 in Context

The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) has been around since the early 1990s. My earliest encounter was somewhere around 1993 or 1994, when I was working at a university research lab not far from London. There was only one browser—NCSA Mosaic—and the number of web servers could be counted on one hand.

When I think back to those days, I wonder why we were so excited about HTML and the World Wide Web. (We had to laboriously type all three words in those days. There wasn't the critical mass or current sense of importance to refer to just “the Web.”

Everything was very basic. I remember some images of gemstones that we could watch load…slowly. This was before the broadband revolution and the entire university ...

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