Re: History of WWW, HTML and SGML

Daniel W. Connolly ([email protected])
Fri, 20 Jan 1995 00:55:09 +0100

In message <[email protected]>, James Michael Stew
art writes:
>I am researching for a project. I need some history and background
>information on the WEB, HTML, and SGML. I have done some searches and
>followed hundreds of links but have not found any good sources yet.
>
>I am looking for dates, people, development breakthroughs, and timelines.

Hmmm... I wonder what resources you were consulting. There's tons
of historical stuff on the web. The place to start, as usual, is:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
aka
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/TheProject

Note the sections:

<DT>Project background</A> <DD><A HREF="Summary.html" NAME="z73">Summary</A>,
<A HREF="Talks/General.html" NAME="z74">Illustrated talk</A>,
<A HREF="People.html" NAME="z75">People</A>,
<A HREF="History.html" NAME="z76">
History</A>, why the <A HREF="http://www.cern.ch/CERN/People/Robert/PersonalData.html#GreenWs">W's are green</A>

I maintain something of a history of the HTML spec at:

http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-spec/notes/PubHistory.html

>Also lists or graphs of statistics about the web would be of great help.

Hmmm... MERIT maintains stats on the Internet, including the Web.
Joseph Hardin gave a talk about the size of the web, including some
impressive graphs showing exponential growth. I don't where these
live, though.

Dan