Table of Contents
If you are already familiar with HTML, XML and JavaScript, you may skip this chapter and immediately start developing a minimal web application by going to the next chapter.
After the Internet had been established in the 1980'ies, Tim Berners-Lee developed the idea and the first implementation of the WWW in 1989 at the European research institution CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The WWW (or, simply, "the Web") is based on the Internet technologies TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) and DNS (the Domain Name System). Initially, the Web consisted of
the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and
web server programs, acting as HTTP servers, as well as web 'user agents' (such as browsers), acting as HTTP clients.
Later, further important technology components have been added to this set of basic web technologies:
the page/document style language Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in 1995,
the web programming language JavaScript in 1995,
the Extensible Markup Language (XML), as the basis of web formats like SVG and RDF/XML, in 1998,
the XML-based Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format in 2001,
the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for knowledge representation on the Web in 2004.