Programming the World Wide Web

The lives of most inhabitants of industrialized countries, as well as some in unindustrialized countries, have been changed forever by the advent of the World Wide Web. Although this transformation has had some downsides—for example, easier access to pornography and gambling and the ease with which people with destructive ideas can propagate those ideas to others—on balance, the changes have been enormously positive. Many use the Internet and the World Wide Web daily, communicating with friends, relatives, and business associates through e-mail and social networking sites, shopping for virtually anything that can be purchased anywhere, and digging up a limitless variety and amount of information, from movie theater schedules, to hotel room prices in cities halfway around the world, to the history and characteristics of the culture of some small and obscure society. Constructing the software and data that provide all of this information requires knowledge of several different technologies, such as markup languages and meta-markup languages, as well as programming skills in a myriad of different programming languages, some specific to the