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by: Carrie Phillips and Katie Smith 2 November 1999
The total number of people online in September 1999 was 201.05 million worldwide. This accounted for 4.78% of the total population, quite an increase from .39% of the population in December 1995 when there were just 16 million people online (NUA Ltd., 1999). The increase in Internet users would not be possible without the invention of a tool that would help people to navigate and utilize the Internet. This invention was the World Wide Web. Since its debut in 1989, it has grown from a medium for read-only material for heavily loaded corporate servers to a forum for the mass of Internet connected consumers (Berners-Lee, 1998). Although it was less popular in its early years, the WWW has become the most widely used protocol. While the Internet exists independently of the WWW, the WWW cannot exist without the Internet. The Internet is a global association of computers that can exchange information, whereas the WWW is a subset of the Internet. The WWW can be thought of as a collection of documents that are linked together using hypertext (Finnie, 1997). Hypertext allows for references within a document to become jumping-off points for other documents. One can follow these references by selecting highlighted items. These highlighted items are known as links. One link can lead to a document that may have other links (Dern, 1994). The WWW is on a browser, where people access it through a server. The browser gets the information by searching for a link's Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. Next it uses HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, to access the document. The document is coded in HyperText Markup Language, or HTML (Nisonger, 1998). The goal for the World Wide Web was for it to be a shared information space where people and machines could communicate. Its invention marked the end of an era of incompatibilities between computer systems (Berners-Lee, 1998). Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the WWW, describes his invention as,
Although Berners-Lee is credited with the application that we use today, the origin of hypertext can be traced back to 1945, when Vanevar Bush wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly about a photo-electrical device called a Memex, for memory extension. This device could create and follow links between documents on microfiche (Calliau, 1995). Two additional developments occurred during the 1960's. Ted Nelson conceived the modern version of hypertext (Zeltser, 1995). Nelson pursued his idea of a global hypertext system as the "Xanadu" project. However, it never got off the ground. Complications arose due to the fact that Nelson wanted to make a profit from his project (Wright, 1997). Also, Doug Engelbart prototyped an "oNLine System", known as NLS, that could accomplish such tasks as hypertext browsing editing and email. Engelbart invented the mouse for this purpose (Calliau, 1995). Berners-Lee was an information technologist at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory) in 1980 when he created a program called "Enquire Within". This program allowed the user to store information using random associations instead of storing files within folders on tree shaped directories. It allowed information to be accessed and cross-referenced by its content (Segaller, 1998). Once Berners-Lee had all the mechanics figured out, he and Robert Cailliau submited a proposal to use the WWW to connect all the servers at CERN with servers around the globe to make them all accessible to each other, via the Internet. The proposal, dated 12 November 1990, was for a two-phase, 6 month project with a manpower requirement of only four software engineers and one programmer (Berners-Lee, 1990). By December 1990 CERN had a Webserver and 2 types of browsers, and by March 1991 they released the software for their text-based browser to a limited group of people. In January 1992, version 1.1 of CERN's text-based browser was available to everyone on the Internet. Graphical browser software was first made available to Macintosh users in January of 1993 (Author Unknown, Date Unknown). Throughout this period of rapid development of the web, Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina, and a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois were working on a graphical based browser for PC users (Plewe, Date Unknown). Their creation, Mosaic, was released in September 1993 with versions for Windows, Macintosh and Unix computers running X Windows(Author Unknown, Date Unknown). Though the first graphical based browser, CERN's Viola client, was available for users of X Windows before Mosaic, Mosaic was the more accessible and widely used browser (Kelly, Date Unknown). The availability of a graphical browser may be one of the reasons that the Web became so popular so quickly (Author Unknown, Date Unknown). The Mosaic project "introduced many extensions to HTML (i.e. inline graphics) that have made the Web what we know today" (Plewe, Date Unknown). The invention of the World Wide Web and the release of Mosaic opened the door to a booming industry. The team leaders for Mosaic, Andreessen and Bina, founded a company called "Mosaic Communications Corp," now known as Netscape (Mayr, Date Unknown). America Online, Netscape, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. have made fortunes with their software and accessibility simply because Berners-Lee chose not to make a profit on the web; he "gave" it to the online community, consequently expanding it and letting it thrive.
Berners-Lee's "original vision of the Web -- a universal medium for sharing information based on freely available technology instead of being controlled by one or a few powerful companies" (Lohr, 1999) led him to M.I.T. to found and serve as director of the World Wide Web Consortium. The consortium is a policeman for Web software -- that all software and browsers are based on a "public standard" (Lohr, 1999). The consortium's first meeting was held in December 1994, the same month that CERN decided to halt WWW development. The project was transferred to INRIA (Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, France), where it remains today (Mayr, Date Unknown). The future of the World Wide Web, protected by its inventor, seems brighter and brighter. Berners-Lee sees "the Web as an adolescent. It has started realizing it has a new-found power. No one knows if it knows how to use it responsibly. And maturity is a long way off" (Lohr, 1999). With the advancements being made everyday in the online world and the possiblities that hypertext holds, the possibilities for the World Wide Web are endless (Zeltser, 1995). For all its success, the Web does have a few minor weaknesses, the only one of any real notice being that there are links that point to documents that do not exist. An author may rename or delete a work from the Web, and the link is useless and time consuming (Zeltser, 1995). This is negligible, however, compared to the expansion and improvements that the Web has brought to the Internet. The Internet went from being an elitest forum for computer "geeks" to a medium of information that is accessible to anyone who can point and click a mouse at their local library. Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the Web has come true -- and his Consortium is in place to make sure that it stays that way. Bibliography: Berners-Lee, Tim. (1998) The World Wide Web: Past, Present, and Future. Online: http://www.w3.org/../people/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html
Segaller, Stephen. (1998) Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. TV Books.
Dern, Daniel P. (1994) The Internet Guide for New Users. McGraw-Hill.
Calliau, Robert. (1995) A Little History of the World Wide Web. Online: http://www.w3.org/History.html
Nisonger, Suzanne. (1998) The History, Current State, and Future of the World Wide Web. Online: http://php.engr.iupui.edu/~snisonge/history.html
Berners-Lee, Tim. (1998) The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal History. Online: http://www.w3.org/../people/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html
Author Unknown. (Date Unknown) The Interview: Tim Berners-Lee. Online: http://www.ora.com/www/info/wj/issue3/tbl-int.html
Berners-Lee, Tim. (1990) WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project. Online: http://www.w3.org/Proposal
Mayr, David. (Date Unknown) The History of the Net. Online: http://members.magnet.at/dmayr/history.htm
Zeltser, Lenny. (1995) The World Wide Web: Origins and Beyond. Online: http://homepage.seas.upenn.edu/~lzeltser/WWW/
Kelly, Brian. (Date Unknown) WWW Handbook. Online: http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/text/handbook/handbook.long.html
Lohr, Steve. (1999) "A Parent's View of the World Wide Web as It Reaches Adolescence" The New York Times.
Plewe, Brandon. (Date Unknown) The World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Online: http://botw.org/1994/awards/fame.html
Gromov, Gregory R. (Date Unknown) History of Internet and WWW: The Roads and Crossroads of Internet History. Online: http://www.internetvalley.com/intvalweb.html
Finnie, Scot. (1997) What is the Web? Online: http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Techno/Networks/ss03.html
Hughes, Kevin. (1995) From Webspace to Cyberspace. Enterprise Integration Technologies.
Wright, Robert. (1997) "The Man Who Invented the Web" Time. Online: http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/1997/dom/970519/tech.the_man_who_i.html
Author Unknown. (1996) "The Web Maestro: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee" MIT Technology Review. Online: http://www.techreview.com/articles/july96/bernerslee.html
Berners-Lee, Tim. (Date Unknown) Policy of the W3 Project. Online: http://www.w3.org/Policy.html
Author Unknown. (Date Unknown) About the World Wide Web: History of the World Wide Web. Online: http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/usage/histweb.html
Kroll, Ed. (1992) The Whole Internet: User's Guide & Catalog. O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
NUA Ltd. (1999) NUA Internet How Many Online. Online: http://www.nua.net/surveys/how_many_online/world.html |
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