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| Facts about the World Wide Web (WWW) and how it evolved into the vast network it is today.
The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global, read-write information space. Text documents, images, multimedia and many other items of information, referred to as resources, are identified by short, unique, global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) so that each can be found, accessed and cross-referenced in the simplest possible way.
The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is actually something that is available over the Internet, just like e-mail and many other Internet services.
The World Wide Web is the combination of four basic ideas:
- Hypertext, is the ability, in a computer environment, to move from one part of a document to another or from one document to another through internal connections among these documents called "hyperlinks."
- Resource Identifiers, are the ability, on a computer network, to locate a particular resource (computer file, document or other resource) on the network through a unique identifier.
- The Client-server model of computing, which is when a client software or a client computer makes requests of server software or a server computer that provides the client with resources or services, such as data or files; and
Markup language, in which characters or codes embedded in text indicate structure, semantic meaning or advice on presentation.
- On the World Wide Web, a client program called a web browser retrieves information resources, such as web pages and other computer files, from web servers using their URLs and displays them, typically on a computer monitor. One can then follow hyperlinks in each page to other resources on the World Wide Web whose location is provided by these hyperlinks. It is also possible, for example by filling in and submitting web forms, to post information back to a server to interact with it. The act of following hyperlinks is often called "browsing" or "surfing" the Web.
Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called "websites." Each website has a "domain name" that is unique to only that website. Domain names were implemented as an easier way to remember the URL of a website, which is actually represented by an IP number. A website can be accessed using either its domain name or IP number as the URL address.
It began in the late 1980's when physicist Dr. Berners-Lee wrote a small computer program for his own personal use. This program allowed pages, within his computer, to be linked together using keywords.
It soon became possible to link documents in different computers, as long as they were connected to the Internet. The document formatting language used to link documents is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language.)
The Web remained primarily text based until 1992. Two events occurred that year that would forever change the way the Web looked. Marc Andreesen developed a new computer program called the NCSA Mosaic (National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois) and gave it away! The NCSA Mosaic was the first Web browser and eventually evolved into the Netscape browser and was soon followed by the Internet Explorer browser. (Today, the latest release of the Netscape browser is called FireFox).The web browser made it easier to access the different Web sites that had started to appear. Soon Web sites contained more than just text, they also had sound and video files.
These pages, written in the hyper-text markup language, have "hyperlinks" (often shortened to just "links" in internet terminology) that allow the user to quickly move from one document to another, even when the documents are stored in different computers.
Web browsers "read" the html text and convert it into a page like the one you are now looking at.
Each web site has an address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The URL contains a set of instructions that are read by the browser.
The beginning of the URL contains the protocol. This is usually "http" (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), "https" (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol), or "ftp" (File Transfer Protocol). The second section of the URL reveals the domain name. Directories follow the domain and are separated by a "/" slash. Last in the URL is the name of the document. (If no document is named the browser will automatically open any document named "default" or "index" in the last named directory.
The phrase "surfing the Internet" was first popularized in print by Jean Armour Polly, a librarian, in an article called Surfing the INTERNET, published in the Wilson Library Bulletin in June, 1992. Although Polly may have developed the phrase independently, slightly earlier uses of similar terms have been found on the Usenet from 1991 and 1992, and some recollections claim it was also used verbally in the hacker community for a couple years before that. Polly is famous as "NetMom" in the history of the Internet.
Although the English word worldwide is normally written as one word (without a space or hyphen), the proper name World Wide Web and abbreviation WWW are now well-established even in formal English. The earliest references to the Web called it the WorldWideWeb (an example of computer programmers' fondness for intercaps) or the World-Wide Web (with a hyphen, this version of the name is the closest to normal English usage).
Ironically, the abbreviation "WWW" is somewhat impractical as it contains three times as many syllables as the full term "World Wide Web", and thus takes longer to say; however it is easier to type.
History of the World Wide Web
The underlying ideas of the Web can be traced as far back as 1980, when Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton, built ENQUIRE (referring to Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book he recalled from his youth). While it was rather different from the Web we use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee's next project after the WWW, the Semantic Web).
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote Information Management: A Proposal, which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more elaborate information management system. With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web on November 12, 1990. He began implementing those ideas immediately, on a recently acquired NeXT workstation.
By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first Web browser (which was a Web editor as well), the first Web server and the first Web pages which described the project itself.
On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.
The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex," which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".
Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.
World Wide Web Standards
At its core, the Web is made up of three standards:
The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which is a universal system for referencing resources on the Web, such as Web pages;
the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which specifies how the browser and server communicate with each other;
and the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), used to define the structure and content of hypertext documents.
Berners-Lee now heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops and maintains these and other standards that enable computers on the Web to effectively store and communicate different forms of information.
The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then available:
The WWW required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing Web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of broken links.
Unlike certain applications, such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.
The free world wide web
On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the announcement that gopher was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from gopher and towards the Web.
The World Wide Web finally gained critical mass with the 1993 release of the graphical Mosaic web browser by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications developed by Marc Andreessen. Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in Web pages and its popularity was less than older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher protocol and Wide area information server. Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become by far the most popular Internet protocol.
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