Class 1: Introduction 

Web history
Introduction to Web Design

ƒ
o ARPANet, the first worldwide network was developed by the
Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). ARPA was started
in 1958 by Eisenhower and several MIT professors. ARPANet
existed from from1969 to 1990, when the government private
agencies like CERN access to the network technology.
o The term Hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960’s.
o One of Nelson’s contemporaries Tim Berners-Lee (of CERN) is
credited as the father of the WWW. With help from Robert
Cailliau, Berners-Lee developed the first browser and
expanded web protocols like FTP among other things.
(1990-93)
o By 1994 terms like email and HTML were household words.
Now we have all sorts of hypermedia. The Internet,
INTERconnected NETworks, is definitely here to stay. At this
point, it can only grow. We, the users, determine how and
where it does that. Horrible monstrosity or marvelous tool, we
decide that.
ƒ Basic Beginning Terminology
o Server can refer to web server or data server that makes files
available to web clients over the Internet.
o Web client can refer to a web browser or other interface that
brings the user in contact with data from a server.
(Popular web browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape
Navigator, Firefox, and Opera)
o Protocol is a set of rules that govern how web communications
happen. HTTP, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol,
defines how web servers and browsers communicate. FTP, or
file transfer protocol, sets the standards for how files are
transferred.
(The first well used one was TCP/IP which came out of ARPANet)
o URL, or uniform resource locator, is the address of the resource
(web site, file, etc) on the Internet.
o HTML, hypertext markup language, is a system of coding pages
for the World Wide Web (WWW).
ƒ Coding web pages uses HTML tags. Tags are letters or abbreviations
that appear in pointy brackets that surround the web content. Most
tags must have an opening and a closing.
ƒ Nowadays HTML coding obeys set standards but unfortunately this has
not always been the case. There are still web pages on the Web that
use outdated code that cases pages to no longer browse properly. In
addition, HTML coding evolves faster that browsers are upgraded. This
means that a page may look fine in one browser but ‘break’ in
another. For practice with basic coding see the Resource List below.
Resource List
History and Terminology of the Internet and World Wide Web
ƒ http:// livinginternet.com
ƒ http:// internet101.com

Basic HTML Coding

ƒ http://www.w3schools.com

UNC‐G CALL Course # N26103 
Notes prepared by Linda Hargrove
September 25, 2006