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.