The first web browser to become truly popular and capture the imagination of the public was NCSA Mosaic. Developed by Marc Andreessen, Jamie Zawinski and others who later went on to create the Netscape browser, NCSA Mosaic was the first to be available for Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh, and the Unix X Window System, which made it possible to bring the web to the average user. The first version appeared in March 1993. The "inline images," such as the boutell.com logo at the top of this page, that are an integral part of almost every web page today were introduced by NCSA Mosaic 2.0, in January of 1994. Mosaic 2.0 also introduced forms.

Netscape is the browser that introduced most all of the remaining major features that define a web browser as we know it. The first version of Netscape appeared in October 1994 under the code name "Mozilla." Netscape 1.0's early beta versions introduced the "progressive rendering" of pages and images, meaning that the page begins to appear and the text can be read even before all of the text and/or images have been completely downloaded. Version 1.1, in March 1995, introduced HTML tables, which are now used in the vast majority of web pages to provide page layout. Version 2.0, in October 1995, introduced frames, Java applets, and JavaScript. Version 2.0 was the last version of Netscape to introduce a major feature of the web as we know it today; later versions improved reliability and stability and introduced features that did not catch on as standards for all browsers. In 1998, Netscape decided to release their browser source code as open source software, and the Mozilla project began.

Although all modern word processors and many specialized tools can be used to make web pages without learning HTML at all, learning HTML itself is a useful way to learn more about the web and provides more control over the results. Luckily, HTML is very simple and quite easy to learn.

HTML was intended to be an instance of SGML, a general-purpose markup language, but many HTML pages do not comply with the requirements of SGML. XHTML, which supersedes HTML, is a newer standard which complies fully with the requirements of XML. XML itself is a further refinement of SGML.

Here is a simple example of an HTML document. To try this out for yourself, simply create a new file called mypage.html with any text editor, such as Windows notepad. Paste in the HTML below, make any changes that please you, and save the document. Then pick "open" from the File menu of your web browser, locate the file you have just made, and open it. If you make further changes, you will need to "save" again and then click "reload" or "refresh" in your browser to see the results.

Of course, this is just a simple example. HTML can do far, far more than this. A complete tutorial can be found at Dave's HTML Guide.

<title>Title of My Page Goes Here</title>
<h1>Heading Of My Page Goes Here</h1>
<a href="http://news.google.com/">Follow this link to Google News</a>
<p>
Here is a picture of my cat:
</p>
<p>
<img src="cat.jpg" />
</p>

Notice that the HTML elements are simple enough to recognize and nearly self-explanatory. The text between the opening and closing <title> and </title> elements becomes the title of the web page. The text between the <h1> and </h1>elements is displayed as a "level one heading," which is typically a very large, bold font. The text between the opening and closing <a> and </a> elements becomes a link to another web page; the URL of the web page to be linked to is found in the HREF attribute of the <a> element as shown in the example above. The <p> element encloses a paragraph.

The <img> element includes an image in your page; the image is displayed at that point in the page, as long as the image file specified by the URL in the SRC attribute actualy exists. Since the SRC attribute I used here contains a simple filename, the cat picture will be shown as long as the file cat.jpg is in the same directory as the page. The same trick can be used in HREF attributes in <a> elements, to conveniently link to pages in the same directory. For more information about images and how to create them in formats appropriate for the web, see the image file formats entry.

The <img> element has a / before the > to signify that it is not a container and that no closing </img> is expected.

Of course, a web page sitting in a file on your own computer is not yet visible to anyone in the outside world. See the setting up web sites entry to learn more about how to create web sites that others can see.