The Web

Paul Prescod (papresco@technologist.com)
Sat, 25 Apr 1998 08:32:22 -0400

A couple of people have asked me about my counting of years between the
SGML standard being published and the Web. According to the Internet
timeline,[1] the Web was released in 1992, which is only six years after
SGML was published, but in my recollection, it did not even begin to
replace Gopher as a popular information system (even among hackers) until
Mosaic was released which IIRC was in 1994. I certainly spent most of my
time on the Internet in 1993 without hearing much, if anything, about the
Web.

Anyhow, the relevant point is that ISO standards in the SGML family that
have been developed since the Web became popular are available online. The
world changed and ISO changed with it.

[1]http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/htmldocs/timeline.html

Paul Prescod - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

"Perpetually obsolescing and thus losing all data and programs every 10
years (the current pattern) is no way to run an information economy or
a civilization." - Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog
http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/10124.html