As I mentioned in the crawl, I'm going to be starting a 6 episode discussion reviewing some of the basics of Internet Technology. I'll begin discussing these topics from the client end of the spectrum through to the data end. Client side web technology can be a very broad topic, but basically, it's made up of three components: the client's platform, the client's software, and what technology is being utilized locally.
The client's platform can be a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device (basic web capabilities or a smart phone); Windows, Mac, Unix, Android, Symbian. Here are some neat statistics from the website w3schools.com on the platform market share right now for their website. Basically, Windows has been a dominant market share for a while, but it's starting to lose ground to mobile devices. The client's software also must be taken into consideration. There are multiple Internet browser versions available such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Also a client can use an installed application to access resources on the web such as MySQL Workbench or the Evernote mobile app. Below is a nice graph indicating where we are now with browser distribution.
The technology that is being utilized locally is always changing. Some of the staples include HTML/cascading style sheets (css), JavaScript, AJAX, and XML. These all come together to define what's called the Web 2.0 phenomenon. You can read more about that here on HowStuffWorks, but basically, different platforms and software can render these different languages into usable information for a user in a graphical user interface, most of the time. Some people still enjoy their black screens with white text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
So how has this all developed over the past few years? Well, one word could sum it up: drastically! Most major companies such as Microsoft and Apple put out a new line of products (platforms and software) at least each year so the client technology development had to be constantly changing to keep up. You can read on HowStuffWorks their articles on Web 1.0 and where they think we are going with Web 3.0. You can also read about the evolution of HTML and where it's going with HTML5.
Additional Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser
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