WWW Notes

World Wide Web - Wikipedia

ja.wikipedia.org

That said, most of it is covered there

WWW

Invented by Tim Berners-Lee

• A URI defines where a document is located

• Describes the content of documents using the media format called HTML

• Delivers HTML using the application protocol HTTP

  • Uses URIs to control delivery

• This is something you don’t often think about when using web apps as a matter of course, but in the end modern web apps haven’t fundamentally changed; they extend this with CSS and JavaScript

  • To put it simply: JavaScript is a language for dynamically rewriting HTML, and CSS is a way to control the appearance of HTML elements in detail
  • To manipulate HTML documents there is a mechanism called the Document Object Model(DOM), and by manipulating it you can change elements.
  • With files like .txt it’s not easy to know where things are, but HTML files have the convenient DOM mechanism so a program can read where content is written as a structure

The JavaScript Era

• However, it’s only relatively recently that this era emerged
  • Previously, browsers differed greatly in the features they supported and compatibility was terrible (the Internet Explorer era, for example)
  • JavaScript itself has existed for a long time, but it was hard to use, and development stagnated during the era when IE dominated
  • Therefore, many older websites were primarily written in HTML/CSS, and few used JavaScript
  • As the browser wars settled and Google Chrome gained dominance around 2008, JavaScript became strong again (maybe due to V8 and similar technologies)
  • Now it’s just JavaScript everywhere…

qiita.com

qiita.com

Standards bodies

• The standards body for HTTP is the IETF, which is straightforward, but HTML/CSS had two organizations: W3C and WHATWG (were there more?)
• W3C had been leading for a long time, but since 2021 it’s been WHATWG
  • WHATWG took over from W3C
    • That said, it was originally started by people dissatisfied with W3C. It seems they now cooperate
    • During the W3C era it was called HTML5, but under WHATWG it became known as the Living Standard
  • Since WHATWG took over, it has been leading standardization for HTML, the DOM, etc.
  • CSS, SVG, accessibility, etc. are handled by W3C
• In the W3C era, as indicated by the name HTML5, the approach was to develop specifications and issue recommendations, but that was slow, so WHATWG adopted a continuously updated approach

There is a well-known site where you can check browser-specific progress for specifications:

Can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc

caniuse.com

OSS (Open Source)

• Among the organizations there’s a group called Mozilla
• It embodies the idea of collaborative development
  • The things they create are public and can be improved by everyone
  • The Firefox browser they create is open source
  • They are highly transparent