As the accessing of information stored on computers has become more widely accepted and used, the number of methods, and hence the number of computer applications needed, has multiplied. The web provides a way of integrating these methods and applications, using a common interface to allow easy access to any information stored on any computer (provided you are authorised to read it, of course).

HTML or HyperText Markup Language, the language of the web, was specifically designed to be easy to learn, and was based around the concept of marking text functionally, to ensure a wide authorship. Thus, when the author wrote their document, they would be able to concentrate on its structure, and not worry about its presentation. As it has grown, the web has moved away from this concept, becoming more complex and more graphical than originally envisioned, which has led to many presentational features creeping into the HTML standard. Happily though, the core functions still lie beneath all the complexity, and allow more or less anyone to write their own web pages quickly and easily, with a minimal set of software tools.