Back in 1998 or so, when I was working at a library as a clerk (putting back books on the shelves), I starting reading a book that caught my eye. The book was called something like HTML for Dummies and it was my first exposure to creating content for the web. For those of you who don’t know, HTML is the foundation language of the internet. HTML was by no means an easy thing to learn, but it was not difficult either. My curiosity kept me reading and later that year, I created a site on geocities.com, which as of later this month will be defunct. It kind of makes me a little sad, actually.

The main thing you should know about HTML is that it was a language created to give browsers, like the one you’re using, instructions on how to display text, pictures, links, etc. Most web pages were very simple in nature since the programmer was usually not very good with graphics or the tools to create graphics were expensive, and compression tools to make those images a decent size were nowhere near as good as they are today. Throw in the fact that most people were on dial-up (56k was fast when I was in High School!), and you ended up with a site that looked like this:

The White House home page...back in 1996.

Yeah, that’s the official White House website. Very plain and boring, and not at all like the whitehouse.gov of today. HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language was great though. It allowed people to create pages that could link to other parts of the site, files, and other sites. The ability to go from one page to the other came to be known as “Web Surfing”, I suppose because it was something like catching one wave after another. Soon enough, we had a huge collection of pages that didn’t look very visually appealing, but were all linking to one another and making information accessible to the world.

The biggest problem with HTML was that, though it allowed the user to view lots of information, it didn’t allow for much participation. You were a consumer, and nothing more.  For example, using the site above as an example, all I could do was search for this thing or that thing. Also, as the creator of the site, If I wanted to make changes to the site, I had to know HTML and have access to FTP (file transfer protocol) to upload the content to the place where all my files are stored on a server.

Take a look at the page you are on right now. This is all code too. If you look at the source of this page, you’ll see that its main structure is still HTML. The biggest difference between this page and a page from 1998 is that now the consumer can also be a participant. You can comment on this page and say something. Not only that, but since the content (take the YouTube video below as an example) and the structure are now separate, you can piece together a webpage using content from thousands of locations (it would make for a crowded site, but hey…enjoy yourself).

A couple years back, I came across a video about the evolution of the internet that truly fascinated me because it illustrated perfectly how web 2.0 worked and how it was different from the original internet. Today, I went back to search for it and found that the version I saw in 2007 had completely changed. This version now explains the changes up to today. Try to follow along, it’s fascinating.

The intro part to the video is a topic that I want to discuss in another post. The way we communicate is changing, and there are lots of people out there that refuse to adapt. What will become of them or what will become of us? That’s a question that’s yet to be answered.