The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML

The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML, by Ian S. Graham, was published in 1995 by John Wiley & Sons. It was a popular user's guide for HTML.

World Wide Web

When The HTML Sourcebook was published in 1995, the World Wide Web had recently become very popular as noted by author Ian S. Graham:

It is fair to say that the World Wide Web project has taken the Internet by storm, confounding Internet skeptics and supporters alike...It is not a surprise that the World Wide Web utilities have grown, in less than three years, to be the most popular tool on the Internet (p. ix).

Assuming that you are familiar with traditional internet resources, such as FTP, telnet, electronic mail, and Gopher, there are essentially three new components to consider:

• Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, which are the scheme by which Internet resources are addressed in the WWW.
• The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and HTTP client - server interactions. HTTP servers are designed specifically to distribute hypertext documents.
• The HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. This is the markup language with which the World Wide Web hypertext documents are written, and is what allows you to create hypertext links, fill-in forms and click able images (p. ix).

Web browsers

Graham lists the following on pages 310-317 as available web browsers:

• Air Mosaic
• Cello
• Spyglass
• WinMosaicer
• WinWeb
• Mosaic for Macintosh
• MACWEB
• Batch Mode Browser
• Chimera
• Mosaic
• ViolaWWW
• The CERN NeXT browser

Coming Attractions

At the time of publication, 1995, the following web browsers were listed on pages 331-332 as Coming Attractions:

• IBM OS/2 Browser: WEB EXPLORER. IBM intends to bundle a browser with the release of OS/2 Version 3.0, sometime in early 1995. This browser will be based on the Mosaic program. Early reviews compare this product favorably with Netscape.

• Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape Communications has designed an all - new WWW browser Netscape, that has significant enhancements over the original Mosaic program. The beta version of Netscape was released in mid-October 1994, to much acclaim and controversy... it is clear that Netscape Communications has jumped to the front with some exciting new ideas, and will certainly spur the development of the WWW browsers and the HTML language.

See also

• History of the Internet

References

• Graham, Ian S. The HTML Sourcebook: The Complete Guide to HTML. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995. (First Edition)

External links

• Official website to the first edition