Freesoft 1998 January/Freesoft_1998-01_cd.bin/Nerecenz/Multimedia/CS/HUMOR.ZIP/html history.txt

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From - Fri Nov 14 17:13:33 1997
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From: Toby Speight <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet
Subject: [comp.infosystems.www.misc] Re: HTML history
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Date: 13 Nov 1997 11:37:42 +0100
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Subject: Re: HTML history
From: [e-mail] (Jorn Barger)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.misc

Samir/Sefian Ghazi <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi!
>     I am actually doing a research on the history of HTML programmation.
> I would like if anybody would know some sites on the internet that could
> help me.
>
>                             Thanks

Blizzard, you've come to the right place, because almost anywhere else
on the Internet they'll give you some cock-and-bull folktale about SGML
and Tim Berners-Lee... but in fact, every HTML tag has a long and rich
history that's never really been spelled out by anyone before.

HEAD and BODY of course were the first tags, going back long before
humans or mammals or even dinosaurs.

Much later, the Ice Age drove primitive humans into caves, where they
invented PRE to make cave paintings possible.  (Some argue that the cold
temperatures also gave birth to BR around this time.)

The first TITLE was probably the Egyptian 'pharaoh', but it wasn't until
the revolutionary movements of the 19th century that this one became
available for the average joe.

In ancient times, *all* speech was considered STRONG, so no tag was
needed, but instead WEAK was used, only when discussing others'
stupidity.  It wasn't until Copernicus and Darwin reduced human pride to
almost nothing that WEAK overtook STRONG in popularity, so that a
special tag for STRONG finally became useful.

EMphasis, though, in the form of hand or arm gestures, was so common
that it's believed to have be depicted in the _angle-bracket_ or
'handwave' notation commonly used for all tags.

UnorderedLists were obviously a Greek invention, followed quickly by the
Romans' OrderedLists.  The Chinese invented BLOCKQUOTE around the year
500, using carved wood.

BLINK was invented by an anonymous lighthousekeeper, made popular by the
neon sign industry, and brought to perfection by the inventor of the
VCR.

BANNER was also popularized by the ad industry, but it took 1980s
conceptual artist Jenny Holzer to integrate all the other tags into
BANNER, a truly revolutionary concept shamelessly plagiarised by
Berners-Lee and the 'inventors' of SGML.

ALT, of course, was a parallel invention of Kibo's.

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