In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed that ENQUIRE, a software project written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1980 at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). ENQUIRE was the predecessor to the World Wide Web, a simple hypertext program At the time around 10,000 people were working at CERN with different hardware and software. The objective was to make a new system that was compatible with different networks, disk formats and encoding schemes. Before ENQUIRE trying to exchange files and information across systems was an impractical and difficult task.
(2012). Tim Berners-Lee. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee. Last accessed 02/05/12.
In later years Berners-Lee realized that ENQUIRE was not a great solution for everybody because most of the people did not know how to use it, nor did everybody have the ability to make cards/pages. ENQUIRE also did not allow hyperlinks to already existing, external databases. From this he saw a new system was needed, one that would allow everybody to interact and create with it.
In 1990 Berners-Lee submitted another proposal in hope to replace ENQUIRE, this time to make a hypertext project called "WorldWideWeb", the objective of this project was to make a system that was publicly accessible and allowed everybody to author and create pages.
(2012). ENQUIRE. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENQUIRE. Last accessed 02/05/12.
One of Berners-Lee's breakthrough was marrying hypertext to the internet. While no one took him up on this invitation, he eventually took the project on himself and created three new technologies;
· The Universal Document Identifier, an identifier of resources on the web.
· HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the publishing language
· Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), an application for protocol distribution, collaboration and hypermedia information systems.
Communication protocols are a set of standard instructions sued by computers to communicate with each other when they are dissimilar systems. Computers must follow these instructions and rules otherwise they cannot communicate. The protocols will determine how data will be sent from one machine to another; they will also determine how the packet information will be organized when being sent. Packet size, authentication, signalling and data compression are also handled by the protocols.
VOIP allows users to transmit their voice to other computers and users. Whereas a normal telephone/landline is analogue based, however analogue is not recognized digitizer and thus the protocol changes the data to be digitized. This also accounts for fax, SMS and other voice messaging services like voicemail. These are also known as “internet telephony” because they do not use the public switched telephone network, obviously. VOIP is used very commonly in everyday life, for sending SMS messages to another or transmitting themselves to an audience.
The first email was sent by an engineer named Ray Tomlinson in 1971, at the time you could only send messages to other users on the same machine, however, Tomlinson gave the ability to send emails to other machines via the internet using the @ sign to pick which machine was to receive the email. At the time emails could only be made up of text, however now you can attach files and images to emails very easily, although most emails generally are text based with a few images. Many companies use email newsletters to keep customers informed of sales/offers and news, many of which will contain the main body which is text and a header, logo and footer.
To view an email there are various different ways, for example you could use a client based program like Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or others. Many people use browser based clients such as hotmail or yahoo. This is generally because they are free and /or cheaper to use than clients, which you may have to pay for. Although in places of work it is not uncommon for each employee to have an email account and the ability to use an email client. Mainly because the software can be bought in bulk for many users. Because of the increase of online shopping, email newsletters have become more common and people receive multiple emails a day, some of which are considered spam and automatically moved to a spam folder.
GSM, Global System for Mobile Communications is the connection of phone and sending and receiving of messages, such as SMS. Currently there are three generations, all developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The current generation, 3G is making use of the internet and connectivity. This has several disadvantages and several advantages. One huge disadvantage is that it interferes with instruments on planes, for example the instruments the pilot uses, and this can have extreme after effects, for example crashing a plane. Despite this it can be very stable with low interference in buildings whereas 1G had a lot more interference and less signal strength. The second generation, 2G was made of digital cellular networks as a replacement of 1G, the first generation which was made up of analog cellular networks. As you can see from the names, the update was obvious, going from analog to digital, an automatic increase in quality, less interference and a larger area base of where it could be used. GSM networks are separated by frequencies and those are split into generations, for example 3G is on a different frequency range to 2G.
Instant Messaging, IM is a popular form of communication using the internet. This form of communication has become very popular as people have gained access to better computers and connections. Many of the IM services provide a client to use it, for example Windows Live Messenger/MSN or Skype. Instant messaging has replaced emails because of the speed and rate at which you can exchange messages, which is in close to real time, depending on the user’s internet connection. Most IM services also allow file transfers, which also removes the need for emails. MSN also has a feature which allows one user to paste a picture into the conversation and it will show a preview to the other users, without having to send the file to the other user. Despite being able to use clients, Gmail has an in browser version for those who do not want to use the client, other services have also done this, such as MSN. IM is also used in business to interact with the customer on a new level, mainly for customer support. Many services now offer live help rooms.
What is HTML? HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. This is what most websites are coded in, thus making it a very common language to know. Although recently HTML5 has been released and started to be used. HTML5 is a direct upgrade from HTML4, allowing users to do more with HTML. One of the other main sources of websites, Flash based ones are being threatened by the presence of HTML5 because it can do more things, which is one thing Flash had over HTML, the ability be able to create more. Which is now becoming more and more available with HTML.
HTML is primarily made up of code consisting of <CODEHERE>Some stuff also goes here </CODEHERE>, HTML can be learned at different levels. For example I have learned basic text formatting from posting on various forums and making note of the code that is input upon pressing a button. For example; <b> ### </b> makes the text in the brackets bold.
"HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages.
HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like <h1>and </h1>, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also calledopening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments and other types of text-based content."
(2012). HTML. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML. Last accessed 01/06/12.
HTML is commonly used to create layouts and templates for web pages also commonly used with CSS, another coding language to produce web pages. For example many Tumblr themes are made using HTML and CSS. The main rival of HTML is Flash based content this is because of the ability to create more things easily and without knowing a lot of code to do so. Although products are beginning to stop supporting Flash such as Apple who do not support Flash based applications or programs. Thus making HTML better as it is available over all systems and platforms.
