Archive | April 11, 2014

HTML – Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0

Apr11

webWeb Versions

The Web has versions? Yes, believe it or not.

When you create a webpage your using HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to tell a browser how to display the text and images to your visitors.  You can learn more about its history and creation on Wikipedia which has a pretty complete entry for HTML.

Basically HTML had its prototypes developed at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1980. Physicist Tim Berners-Lee has been credited with starting the whole thing off. By 1989, he began work on a browser technology to easily display the evolved versions of his prototype language and HTML was developed. Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau collaborated on a joint request for funding, but the project was not formally adopted by CERN. The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called “HTML Tags”, first mentioned on the Internet by Berners-Lee in late 1991. Continue reading →

HTML 106 – Special Characters

Apr11

asciiUsing Special Characters

In your web page design it maybe necessary for some part of your textual information to include special characters, such as the copyright or trademark symbol.

These special characters are referred to as ASCII Characters. The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services.

ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (many now obsolete)[7] that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, including the space (which is considered an invisible graphic) – Wikipedia ASCII.

Today’s HTML and Blog editors allow you to simply copy the symbol and paste it into your text. Back in the day, you could only add these characters by knowing the special ASCII Code. You can find codes for the Office, Business, Math, Currency, Astrological and Weather symbols and even Chess and Playing Cards. Continue reading →