Kevin Ch'ng's Blog
Kevin Ch'ng male Junior Writer
A person who is imbibed by the beats of music. Still a novice in his journey to become an audiophile, he samples music from all genre but prefers Electro, Trance, Techno and surprisingly, 80's New Wave. Tech wise, he seeks out all things mobile and loves the concept of bringing a piece of technology wherever he goes.
Do you still remember what the first website made available globally looks like?
For most of us today, websites are laced with the best of both worlds in terms of web-based representation, which are text and graphics. Though the journey to the here and now did not start off with the two coming in hand-in-hand, it was the ingenious idea of Sir Timothy John 'Tim' Berners-Lee that started it all.
The very first website to ever made itself available to the public was, of course, comprised of nothing more than just pure text. The earliest form of navigation was hyperlinks that link separate pages (click clickety click). That was the only impression you will notice from back in the days, where interactions were fairly limited to simple page-to-page navigation. What's more, they're all wordy. Given that it was a new thing, the initial phase of HTML implementations would already suffice for most.
It wasn't long until people grew tired of just textual representation. It would only make sense when the Internet became a channel for businesses to promote themselves, that text can only do so much but give a description of the products and services they could offer. What was missing was photographic evidence, or maybe just more visuals to attract the potential customers. As the saying goes, love at first sight – or at least the appeal grows with what we see. All that became a realization when HTML 2.0 started making the IMG tag as a standard for perceiving and displaying images on web pages.
Just like adding seasoning to the cooking pot, that simple addition has definitely spiced things up for everyone, and for the better. Browsing websites were no longer a mundane task of going through walls of text but with 'eye candy' images to draw and keep the attention of readers. But that wasn't enough. People wanted more than just still imagery, we wanted more interactivity – we wanted something that literally 'pops out'.
The solution to that was fairly simple. More and more media were supported with the EMBED (and OBJECT in HTML 4.0) tag, which was also introduced in HTML 2.0, and that was when the web started to come alive.
With more and more websites going into the trend of fully incorporating Adobe Macromedia Flash or Microsoft Silverlight as their main structure, the amount of actual text in pages becomes significantly less needed as these applications facilitate textual representations as well. That means more and more of these static text will surely decline in appearance, making the only text associated with the website as codes visible to programmers.
The numbers are evidently dwindling as more and more people favor imagery over text, that is not to say that texts will be completely wiped off from the face of the web. It's just that it'll be making less of an appearance to us in general. Call me old-fashioned, but I will surely miss reading all those meticulously riddled text-based sites.
