Chapter 1. HTML, XHTML, and the World Wide Web
Though it began as a military experiment and spent its adolescence as
a sandbox for academics and eccentrics, in less than a decade the
worldwide network of computer networks -- also known as the
Internet — has matured into a highly
diversified, financially important community of computer users and
information vendors. From the boardroom to your living room, you can
bump into Internet users of nearly any and all nationalities, of any
and all persuasions, from serious to frivolous individuals, from
businesses to nonprofit organizations, and from born-again Christian
evangelists to pornographers.
In many ways, the Web — the open community of hypertext-enabled
document servers and readers on the Internet — is responsible for
the meteoric rise in the network's popularity. You,
too, can become a valued member by contributing: writing HTML and
XHTML documents and then making them available to web surfers
worldwide.
Let's climb up the Internet family tree to gain some
deeper insight into its magnificence, not only as an exercise of
curiosity, but to help us better understand just who and what it is
we are dealing with when we go online.
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