For many of us, we’ve seen a steady progression in the quality and types of websites that are presented online. This progression is a result of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the browsers (Netscape, Opera, Mozilla, etc) defining the features that will be provided for, and the standards for consistency across the browsers. This is not to say that the browsers are still consistent, unfortunately they are not which results in subtle viewing changes between the browsers. Following is a brief history on how the browsers have changed since their inception. The important thing to note is that all websites coded in the “early development history” need to be updated to be compliant with current coding standards.
Note: If you are unclear on how to determine your website “version”, you need to view the page “source”. To do this right mouse-click upon the web page, and select “view source”. Or, depending upon your browser, you may need to go to the tool bar at the top of your browser window, select “page”, then “view source”. Once you do this you will see your page in “code view”. At the top (first line) is the doctype declaration as shown following.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
EARLY DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
HTML 1.0 (1989-1994)
First web pages consisting of basic text on a page, and inline images.
HTML 2.0 (1995)
This specification supported more browsers, and allowed for:
- forms with limited set of form elements such as text boxes, and option buttons
- change of page background
- use of tables
HTML 3.0 (Abandoned)
HTML 3.20 (1997)
This version included support for creating tables and expanded options for form elements and also allowed web pages to include complex mathematical equations. It also supported inline CSS (cascading style sheets) though browser manufacturers did not support it well.
HTML 4.0 (Edited to v 4.01)
* all websites built in these early versions need to be updated
CURRENT DEVELOPMENT OPTIONS
HTML 4.01 (1999)
This version added support for style sheets and scripting ability for multimedia elements. HTML 4.01 focused on separating presentation styling information from the actual content by the use of style sheets as HTML 3.20 resulted in difficult maintenance because presentation styling information was included directly in the webpage.
XHTML 1.0
By February 1999 the name of the specification had changed to XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language, and in January 2000 it was officially adopted as a W3C Recommendation. There are three formal DTDs (Doc-Type Declarations) for XHTML 1.0, corresponding to the three different versions of HTML 4.01:
- XHTML 1.0 Strict is the XML equivalent to strict HTML 4.01, and includes elements and attributes that have not been marked deprecated in the HTML 4.01 specification.
- XHTML 1.0 Transitional is the XML equivalent of HTML 4.01 Transitional, and includes the presentational elements (such as center, font and strike) excluded from the strict version.
- XHTML 1.0 Frameset is the XML equivalent of HTML 4.01 Frameset, and allows for the definition of frameset documents—a common Web feature in the late 1990s.
* XHTML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation in August 2002.
XTHML 1.1
A second edition of XHTML 1.1 was issued on 23 November 2010, which addresses various errata and adds an XML Schema implementation not included in the original specification.
XHTML 2.0
Extended functionality, though not fully supported by all browsers so few designers use it.
HTML5 (2007)
HTML5 has both a regular text/html serialization and an XML serialization, which is known as XHTML5. In addition to the markup language, the specification includes a number of application programming interfaces. The Document Object Model is extended with APIs for editing, drag-and-drop, data storage and network communication. The major benefits of HTML5 include elegant forms, user interface enhancements, reduced need for JavaScript, and forms validation native to HTML. Features of HTML5 include video, audio, figure, section, nav, header, canvas, and footer.
HTML5 is designed for the web, both now and in the future (support for mobile devices is a given). This is the specification that we will be working with for the next several years, so the process of its development is relatively slow and considered. At this point all major browsers support significant portions of HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies, yet HTML5/CSS3 support is inconsistent and incomplete overall. This means that no two browsers support HTML5/CSS3 to the same degree, and no single browser supports all HTML5/CSS3 features completely.
For quick reference, the Chrome browser is supported the most, followed by Opera, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.
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Do you need to update? As noted in the “early development history”, each of the early versions were improved upon so it wouldn’t make sense to continue to use a development framework that fails to provide the necessary features of quality web pages. Moreover, as browsers are updated they will eventually decrease support for the older browser versions, which could in effect result in your outdated web page no longer being visible.
The long and short is that you need to be aware of how your site is coded since this can affect how easily it can be viewed, its ability to be upgraded over time, and even SEO since pages bloated with tags will load slower and decrease their ability to be indexed effectively by the search engines.
