Despite the technology??™s healthy level of expansion, the general public remained largely
unaware of the Internet until well into the 1990s. By this time, HTML had evolved from a
fairly loose set of rules??”browsers having to make assumptions regarding coder intent and
rendering output??”to a somewhat stricter set of specifications and recommendations.
This, along with a combination of inexpensive hardware, the advent of highly usable web
browsers such as Mosaic (see the following image), and improved communications technology,
saw an explosion of growth that continues to this day.
Initially, only the largest brands dipped their toes into these new waters, but soon thousands
of companies were on the Web, enabling customers all over the globe to access
information, and later to shop online. Home users soon got in on the act, once it became
clear that the basics of web design weren??™t rocket science, and that, in a sense, everyone
THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CSS AND HTML WEB DESIGN
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could do it??”all you needed was a text editor, an FTP client, and some web space.
Designers soon got in on the act, increasingly catered for by new elements within HTML;
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which took a while to be adopted by browsers, but eventually
provided a means of creating highly advanced layouts for the Web; and faster web
connections, which made media-rich sites accessible to the general public without forcing
them to wait ages for content to download.
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