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When you are surfing through the web you generally see some pages that are not displayed properly, the frames become all mixed up and the content become unreadable. Many surfers think that it is a problem of coding and the blame incompetent coders. Actually, if you feel better placing blame, it belongs with the greedy program distributors like Microsoft and Sun Systems which turned the great educational idea of Tim Berners-Lee into a competition area and a complex language not having a standard form.

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. In 1989, Tim was working in a computing services section of CERN when he came up with the concept (web); at the time he had no idea that it would be implemented on such an enormous scale. Particle physics research often involves collaboration among institutes from all over the world. Tim had the idea of enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and pool together information. But far from simply making available a large number of research documents as files that could be downloaded to individual computers; he suggested that you could actually link the text in the files themselves.

In other words, there could be cross-references from one research paper to another. This would mean that while reading one research paper, you could quickly display part of another paper that holds directly relevant text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific and mathematical nature would thus be represented as a ‘web’ of information held in electronic form on computers across the world. This, Tim thought, could be done by using some form of hypertext, some way of linking documents together by using buttons on the screen, which you simply clicked on to jump from one paper to another.

Tim’s simple but effective idea turned out to be the greatest communication device of humanity even if it was not supported by big companies and manufacturers. For instance, Hewlett-Packard, in common with many other large computer companies, was quite unconvinced that the Internet would be a success; indeed, the need for a global hypertext system simply passed them by. For many large corporations, the question of whether or not any money could be made from the Web was unclear from the outset.

Later, especially after Mosaic, the first web browser was released; the competition between the companies became more obvious. The later version of Mosaic in competition with the Microsoft Internet Explorer added new features to the HTML language like n-compass and active-x controls respectively. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium was formed to fulfill the potential of the Web through the development of open standards. They had a strong interest in HTML. Just as an orchestra insisting on the best musicians, the consortium recruited many of the best-known names in the Web community headed up by Tim Berners-Lee. During 1995, all kinds of new HTML tags emerged. Some, like the BGCOLOR attribute of the BODY element and FONT FACE, which control stylistic aspects of a document, found themselves in the black books of the academic engineering community. “You’re not supposed to be able to do things like that in HTML,” they would protest. In the end, the technology of web was for the pure purpose of science and technology. It was not supposed to turn into a multimedia “tool”. It was their belief that such things as text color, background texture, font size and font face were definitely outside the scope of a language when their only intent was to specify how a document would be organized.

While the W3 Consortium was working on already the HTML 3, the web design was benefiting the competition between the Netscape and IE. Even for the good intentions of the consortium, the big corporations insisted on creating their own derivatives for HTML. This was creating many compatibility problems. Finally, following the success of the November, 1995 meeting, the World Wide Web Consortium formed the HTML Editorial Review Board to help with the standardization process. This board consisted of representatives from IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, Softquad and the W3 Consortium, and did its business via telephone conference and email exchanges, meeting approximately once every three months. Its aim was to collaborate and agree upon a common standard for HTML, thus putting an end to the era when browsers each implemented a different subset of the language. The bad fairy of incompatibility was to be banished from the HTML kingdom forever, or one could hope so, perhaps.

The incompatibility was not banished but was at least minimized. However, HTML kept on growing and the last versions like the dynamic HTML, like HTML 4.0 brought new colors and usages for this language. Especially after the edition of style sheets, it became extremely difficult to standardize the view of a web page depending on the browser you use.

As you can see, HTML was written for the pure purpose of information sharing but turned into a mass communication mechanism. It was supposed to be an organizational language, and yet became multi-media source where you can edit the layout and add images, sound and many other multimedia files. We can blame the evolution process of this language for the non-standardized nature of it.

The answer to the question, ‘Do I need to learn programming?’ is: It depends. It depends on what exactly you mean by programming. You need to know a little bit of web programming like HTML and Javascript so that you do not need to depend on someone else for additions and editing your work (if you intend to build your own website). Those two languages are some of the basics that everyone should know.

If you’re referring to software programming then the answer is: No you do not need to learn programming. You do not need to learn it to get ahead as it is usually the concept or the idea which can make you money and not a programming tool or language.

Further, the world is getting more and more specialized. In order stay in tune with it, you need to find your niche and build with it. Nobody can be good at everything. It’s about delegation. Unless you plan to become a professional programmer, and getting a formal education for it, leave development up to other experienced developers.

Additionally, from a practical standpoint, it is dangerous for everyone to try to do web programming. Some of the coding, for example one of the variables the tell-a-friend script pulls from the form is openly included in the message it sends out. The problem with that is if someone who knows what they’re doing, with regard to programming gets a hold of it, they could easily recode the tell-a-friend form into an open spam relay. It is a script with a major hole just sitting there waiting to be exploited. That’s the risk you run when you don’t understand the ramifications of every line of code. If you do not have the time or desire to learn serious coding, and some basic code security techniques, you will only make life harder for other netizens and in the end, for yourself.

So unless you plan to become a professional programmer and take the time to study these things, there’s really no need to learn programming. Rather, hire someone who is a professional and let them do the work for you. Finding a professional programmer is easy too. All you need to do is visit http://www.rentacoder.com and put out a bid for your project. You’ll get programmers from all over the world quoting on your project. Entrepreneurs use them all the time and have wonderful results. Hiring someone is not only far more effective, but it leverages your role as the project manager and takes you out of the creator mindset.