by Andrew Wigglesworth

Created on: November 11, 2008

A simple answer? Hubris, folly, human frailty, mistakes, greed and then sometimes because they're supposed to.

For a more comprehensive answer we need to get back to the start of the World Wide Web in 1990 at CERN, with it's inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

One of the fundamental breakthroughs that Berners-Lee made when designing the original World Wide Web was the marrying together of the Internet with hypertext. What is hypertext? It's the thing you see every time you look at a web page with text and links.

Hypertext did away with the hierarchical nature of the pre-existing Internet when used with another of Berners-Lee's ideas, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). With URL's everything on the Web has it's own address and can be linked directly. On the World Wide Web, everything could link to to everything.

The hypertext language devised was called HTML. It was simple, clean and rendered text only. To this day, the Web still is essentially a text medium. This was fine whilst the Web was being used by a small essentially academic community. Things changed when in 1993 CERN allowed the Web to go public for free.

The Web grew exponentially, designers and software companies appeared, and everything started to get very, very complicated.

Designers wanted multiple fonts, pictures, colours and complex designs where they could position things perfectly. They started to use markup tags in ways that they were never intended and used "clever" tricks to position elements on the screen, often trying to emulate the design certainties that they had in the print world.

Software companies wanted people to use their software. One of the classic ways to capture market share used by proprietary software companies is what is called lock-in. Give the customer something but implement it in a way that is incompatible with other companies programmes. This is the reason for such things as multiple word processor formats.

We sometimes think of Netscape (stemming from the Mosaic browser) as being at the very start of the Web, but in many ways they were late-comers. The fundamental basis of the Web had already been laid down by Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium that he founded in 1994. Netscape had to go along with this to a great extent, however, their instincts told them to try to subvert the conventions, try to steal a march on their competitors and grab all-important market share.

Microsoft eventually woke up to the web and wanted the browser market for themselves. Netscape responded

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