The Internet began in the late 1960s as an experiment. Its goal was to create a truly resilient information network—one that could withstand the loss of several computers without preventing the others from communicating. Driven by potential disaster scenar-ios (such as nuclear attack), the U.S. Department of Defense provided the initial funding.
The early Internet was mostly limited to educational institutions and defense contrac-tors. It flourished as a tool for academic collaboration, allowing researchers across the globe to share information. In the early 1990s, modems were created that could work over existing phone lines, and the Internet began to open up to commercial users. In 1993, the first HTML browser was created, and the Internet revolution began.
It would be difficult to describe early websites as web applications. Instead, the first gen-eration of websites often looked more like brochures, consisting mostly of fixed HTML pages that needed to be updated by hand.
A basic HTML page is a little like a word-processing document—it contains formatted content that can be displayed on your computer, but it doesn’t actually do anything. The following example shows HTML at its simplest, with a document that contains a heading and single line of text:
因特網(wǎng)是在1960年末在試驗(yàn)中誕生的。它的目標(biāo)是：建立一個(gè)真實(shí)的、有彈性的信息網(wǎng)絡(luò)——可以經(jīng)受的起若干數(shù)量的電腦的崩潰，而不至于阻斷其他電腦的正常通信。經(jīng)得起潛在的重大災(zāi)難（如核武器攻擊）。美國國防部提供了剛開始的研究基金。最早的因特網(wǎng)局限在教育機(jī)構(gòu)和從事國防的單位。它因?yàn)樽鳛閷W(xué)術(shù)研究的一種工具而繁榮，它讓全球的研究人員可以彼此共享信息。到了1990初，偉大的“貓”誕生了，它通過電話線工作，從此，因特網(wǎng)向商業(yè)用戶打開了大門。在1993年，第一個(gè)HTML瀏覽器誕生了，標(biāo)志著因特網(wǎng)革命的到來。
我們很難把最早的網(wǎng)頁稱為網(wǎng)頁程序。第一代的網(wǎng)頁看起來更像小冊(cè)子：主要由固定的HTML頁面構(gòu)成，這些也都需要手動(dòng)修改。一個(gè)簡(jiǎn)單的HTML頁面有點(diǎn)像一個(gè)字處理文檔——它包含了格式化的內(nèi)容，可以在你的電腦上顯示，但是并不完成其他任何功能。上面的就是一個(gè)最簡(jiǎn)單的例子，文檔包括頭信息和單行文本。
一個(gè)HTML文檔有兩種類型的內(nèi)容：文本和標(biāo)記（告訴瀏覽器如何格式化）。這些標(biāo)記很容易辨認(rèn)，因?yàn)樗鼈兛偸浅霈F(xiàn)在之間。HTML定義了不同級(jí)別的標(biāo)題、段落、超鏈接、斜體和粗體格式、水平線等。舉個(gè)例子：某個(gè)文本，告訴瀏覽器用標(biāo)題1的格式來顯示這個(gè)文本，就是用最大的黑體字來顯示。