500 years of print development

It took 500 years from the time Gutenberg introduced the printing press to reach the electronic book of today. In the short period of the last 10 years, we have moved from the textual web page to rich media. Some of the main components of the illuminated manuscript still exist in the web page. The illustrated dropcapital (called an historiated initial ) and the floral borders or marginalia have been replaced by the GIF image. The illustrations, engravings, and half-tones of the print medium are now JPEG images. But the elements of the web page are not that different from the books of 1500.