HTML and the World Wide Web

HTML: The Building Blocks of the Web

Just about everything a person views on the World Wide Web is constructed using a series of code called HTML. HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, is at its core a way to represent hypertext content in a readable fashion for users. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990s, it was intended to “[enable] researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and pool together information.” It was developed in conjunction with the World Wide Web itself to aid in research, but that project would grow to form an infrastructure upon which most every person on the planet engages with every day.

HTML functions via a series of tags that are then read by a computer program. These tags are denoted by the use of angle brackets (“<” and “>”) which enclose the specific media that is being marked up. For example, text found within a “<title>” tag would be marked as the title for the page being displayed, and all the text following the tag until its end (marked by a corresponding “</title>” tag) would be affected by the tag. These styles of tags were not Berners-Lee’s own invention, however; much of the design of HTML was taken from another markup language, Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML. Specifically, the paired tag system using angle brackets was lifted from SGML, as well as some of SGML’s own tags like <title> and <p> (paragraph). HTML, however, provided its own expansion upon SGML, as Berners-Lee himself notes, by allowing the navigation of hypertext documents while also being easier to use than SGML, making it an easy to use language that would also make navigating the Web consistently simple to navigate for any user.

TO BE FILLED IN

HTML isn’t a static language, either. It is intimately tied to the Web’s history, and as the Web itself has grown and changed in the last 20 years or so, HTML has undergone revisions as well. HTML is developed and revised using standards proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which formed in 1994 in response to the growing popularity of the Web and the need to provide a central structure to “lead the Web to its full potential.” The W3C’s goal is thus to look at the needs of developers to find what changes need to be made to HTML, proposing the new “standard” that essentially governs the very structure of the Web itself. For instance, the most recent iteration of HTML is HTML5, which was developed over a course of years before having its final release in 2014, which allowed for new dedicated tags like “<video>” to seamlessly embed video elements into webpages. As the W3C would likely argue, the act of standardizing and revising HTML serves to provide upkeep to the Web while also satisfying its growing needs as new technologies come into popular use.

Limits of the HTML Web System: Decay, Deletion, and DRM

Yet HTML and its method of standardization are not without their limits and criticisms. Most notably, HTML being a standardized language means that it doesn’t necessarily support every single element a developer would wish to use. It only has a limited number of tags, and old tags can be made obsolete between versions of HTML. Thus, older webpages using now-defunct code are not going to display properly, and that history of browsing experience will be lost in the public consciousness. There are alternatives to HTML that work around this problem, like Extensible Markup Language (XML) which allow for the development of custom tags that work between versions of itself, functioning as a sort of extension to HTML. HTML5 even implements XML elements; unfortunately, XML still has its limits. XML does not provide the structure for a program to be able to read any custom tags; those programs have to be developed separately. Even if new tags are made to support certain content, it isn’t necessarily going to be able to be read by every user unless time and labor was used in producing a program that each user would have to adopt, which isn’t a working solution to this problem.

TO BE FILLED IN

Any page on the Web, regardless of the content coded in for display, can be suddenly at risk of becoming defunct from a host of reasons. As ReadySet’s shuttering shows, that reason can be financial, as their holding company ZAM saw no further profit in keeping the site running. Even web browsers themselves can render countless webpages unsupported, as was the case with many browser game developers when Google announced an update in May for its browser, Google Chrome. This update, intended to push back against one of the Web’s widely perceived nuisances, auto-playing videos with audio, was pushed out without notice over a weekend and began to affect browser games as well. Games in which the audio was an important aspect of their experience were suddenly kicked to the curb and many developers were confused as to what had happened, others suddenly at risk of losing income if the projects they depended on for a living suddenly couldn’t work in Chrome. The implementation of this update would be delayed, but it would still occur, essentially putting the onus on developers to make sure their games could actually be played as they were meant to rather than lose a core feature. It’s a troubling move to have a company with such clout as Google to unilaterally change make changes to the open standards that developers are familiar with, one that heavily suggests an unstable future for lasting media and art on the Web.

Lastly, there is a developing problem with HTML that threatens to dismantle the open, sharing nature of the Web, a problem that comes directly from the W3C itself. As part of their recommendation process for updating the standards to HTML, the W3C has laid down the foundation for the implementation of Digital Rights Management within HTML itself. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is essentially a form of copy-protection that is meant to act as a deterrent to piracy of copyrighted works by controlling who has access to particular types of content. In practice, it can take the form of limiting the number of devices that have access to a program or piece of software. Its implementation, regardless of the concern about piracy, could restrict the openness of the Web as well as stunt the progress of preservationist efforts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works to protect the open Web, made moves to condemn this act, going so far as to resign from the W3C for refusing to back down from moving forward on the recommendation because of how antithetical it was to its philosophy. The recommendation, in their eyes, represented a kind of hostile corporate takeover of the Web, capitulating to their own interests at the expense of the wider populace. Even from Berners-Lee’s original vision for the Web, it was intended to be a space for sharing documents between users, and the implementation of something like DRM at such a grand scale would be a step towards tearing down that vision.

Conclusion

In the digital age, HTML has become a more popular way to present content than even books while also being able to display so much more. It has helped form the very structure of the Web itself, presenting a vast array of content available to just about every person on Earth with a computer or mobile device. Yet, the Web is also in many ways adverse to its own history, incredibly susceptible to erasure and decay, and can be turned in an instant into an exclusionary device that locks out users. As the ever-expanding primary source of information today, the HTML-backed Web is completely unsuitable for a sustainable means of preservation. ReadySet was but one example of years of work, of media produced disappearing into the ether. An enormous part of the modern cultural record could be gone in but a single moment – and so much of it already has.