Gregory Stigers writes:

>...the predecessor to HTML was SGML, Standard Generalized Markup
>Language.

SGML is a language for describing document content, and it's alive and
well today. It is to document descriptions what PostScript is to printer
images: a standard, machine-independent way of describing the appearance
of a document. SGML is widely used for documentation in government and
military applications. It's also a meta-language; HTML is one of the
languages that can be described in SGML. SGML is an international
standard, ISO 8879.

>I am guessing that [Tim Berners-Lee] invented such a language;

He wrote the first browser and server (and developed HTTP) using a NeXT
machine. As others have mentioned, the idea of navigating around a
computer network using hypertext originated earlier; people who say he
"invented the Web" are probably referring to the content-independent HTTP
protocol. See <http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Summary.html> for his original
vision statement and a summary of operation as originally conceived.
Berners-Lee, incidentally, now heads the World-Wide Web Consortium
(<http://www.w3.org>).

>I
>understand that CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee was when he started this
>work, is no longer 'on the web'.

Their main server is www.cern.ch, and it's still as interesting as ever.
(Well, OK, it's interesting if you're interested in high-energy physics
:-).) CERN is no longer doing WWW software development.

-- Bruce

PS. Every couple of days, someone calls me offering to set up a web site
for my company. My first question is always "Why should I want to do
that?" It gets some interesting answers, but the last such answer I
received was so blatantly hyped that I gave up my usual game of
bait-the-Web-salesman and told him what I thought of his offer. I also
pointed out to him that I'd been working with the Internet in one way or
another for the past ten years, and that people like himself, who take
large amounts of money and promise results that they can't possibly
deliver, were giving the whole thing a bad name.

His response was instructive: "Well, I've been doing this for two years,
and if it weren't for people like me, the Internet would be _nothing_
today."

- B


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