All I know about coffee is my occasional cup of Maxwell House with a scoop of sugar and a long pour of 2% milk. Recently I stepped into a coffee shop with my sister. She ordered a double mocha latte. It was served in a 12 ounce hot-liquid-proof paper cup with a cardboard sleeve to protect her delicate fingers. The frothy cream was tucked beneath a high rise white plastic lid that had a small oval opening for sipping.
How did we get from black coffee to double mocha latte?
In the global information revolution you can ask how we got from simple text, a word is a word, to designer logos and flashy graphics.
The Internet would be pretty plain if we could only see black and white text. Sure we would be connected, but who would want to read the dictionary every day?
In 1990 a computer software specialist working at CERN, a Particle Physics Lab in Geneva, Switzerland, wrote the World Wide Web software program. This software program included the standards for Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
HTML is a way to take any plain text you type in on the computer and format it, so that when it travels over the internet it will show up on the connected computer screen with the colors, fonts, headlines, graphics and hypertext links in the way you want it presented.
Tim Berners-Lee also recognized that computers like all machines can only perform the task they are given while humans excel at associating related or tangential ideas. For example, the computer can store and transfer data. If you ask for a stored file on coffee it will give you the file exactly as you asked for it.
If someone asks me if I drink coffee I will tell them about my Maxwell House, but I might also share with them topics that I feel are related like how fancy the double mocha latte is or the fact that Java is the name for a computer programming tool.
HTML enables machines to present related or parallel ideas programmed in by humans.
As part of the Hypertext Markup programming language there are codes of tags to link a word or phrase in a text to a related resource. When creating a web page with HTML tags the human programmer can create hypertext links to other pages on the web. For example, I could write a personal web page that includes the code:
a href= “http://www.ci.danville.va.us/can.htm” for the Danville Can Campaign
When my web page is finished you could read my paragraph about how I live in a small southern city and our city has just started the Danville Can Campaign. In the text Danville Can Campaign would be highlighted and when you click on it you can go from reading about me to reading about Danville creating a brighter future.
So, Tim Berners-Lee gave us creative text and hypertext link with the HTML tools. He envisioned a global use of hypertext and his original software standards are now used by all internet software. The “World Wide Web” software program now exists primarily as a source for standards for the World Wide Web, the cyberspace web of hypertext documents.
There are now programming tools that make it even easier to create your own web page. One of the latest programming tools is the WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get.” You type in your text and make it look the way you want it to on your screen. The WYSIWYG editor software takes what is on the screen and applies the proper HTML tags around it to make it look exactly as you typed it wherever it goes.
It’s double mocha latte without all the fuss.
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