From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Today, the Web and the Internet allow connectivity from literally everywhere on earth—even ships at sea and in outer space.The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does. The history of the Internet dates back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

The hypertext portion of the Web has an interesting history, notable influences being IBM's Generalized Markup Language and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. Since its implementation in the 1990s as an academic system for sharing papers, the World Wide Web has evolved far beyond what its creators imagined.

1980-91: Development of the World Wide Web

In 1980, the Englishman Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at CERN, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to play with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to an existing page.

Another major development occurred when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in 1977 for cross-network connections.[1] Although it had used the older Network Control Protocol (NCP) since its establishment in 1969, ARPANET and its associated networks slowly began a transition to the new protocol during the 1970s. In 1978, Internet Protocol was added to TCP, responsible for the routing of messages. The TCP/IP combination was officially adopted by ARPANET and its partners in 1983, redefining the Internet as networks using the TCP/IP network. The standardisation of network protocols helped lay the foundations for the later growth of the World Wide Web.

In 1984 Berners-Lee returned to CERN, and considered its problems of information presentation: physicists from around the world needed to share data, with no common machines and no common presentation software. He wrote a proposal in March 1989 for "a large hypertext database with typed links", but it generated little interest. His boss, Mike Sendall, encouraged Berners-Lee to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine (turned down as it abbreviates to TIM, the WWW's creator's name) or Mine of Information (turned down because it abbreviates to MOI which is "Me" in French), but settled on World Wide Web.[citation needed]

He found an enthusiastic collaborator in Robert Cailliau, who rewrote the proposal (published on November 12, 1990) and sought resources within CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched their ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate their vision of marrying hypertext with the Internet.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first Web browser, WorldWideWeb (which was also a Web editor), the first Web server (info.cern.ch), and the first Web pages that described the project itself. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. However, it could run only on the NeXT; Nicola Pellow therefore created a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer. To encourage use within CERN, they put the CERN telephone directory on the web — previously users had had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers.

Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center visited CERN in May 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to display SLAC’s catalog of online documents; this was the first web server outside CERN and the first in North America.[citation needed]

On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee 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 WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!" —from Tim Berners-Lee's first message

1992-1995: Growth of the WWW

In keeping with its birth at CERN, early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as Fermilab and SLAC.

Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the then-popular Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages, such as Berners-Lee's first site at http://info.cern.ch/, or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines.

There was still no graphical browser available for computers besides the NeXT. This gap was filled in April 1992 with the release of Erwise, an application developed at Helsinki University of Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. Both programs ran on the X Window System for Unix.

Students at the University of Kansas adapted an existing text-only hypertext browser, Lynx, to access the web. Lynx was available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers, unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a website not accessible through Lynx wasn’t worth visiting.

Early Browsers

The turning point for the World Wide Web was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill.

The origins of Mosaic begin in 1992. In November 1992, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) established a website. In December 1992, Andreessen and Eric Bina, students attending UIUC and working at the NCSA, began work on Mosaic. They released an X Window browser in February 1993. It gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia, and the authors’ rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.

After graduation, Andreessen and Jim Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic Communications Corporation to develop the Mosaic browser commercially. The company changed its name to Netscape in April 1994, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator.

The first Microsoft Windows browser was Cello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since most lawyers had access to Windows but not to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.

Web organization
In May 1994 the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since. In April CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the perturbation caused by the University of Minnesota announcing that it would begin charging license fees for its implementation of the Gopher protocol.

In September 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an industry organization, with Tim Berners-Lee as director.

[...]

2002-Present: The Web becomes ubiquitous

In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, the World Wide Web continued to gain popularity even though many businesses trying to exploit it went bankrupt. Also during this time, however, a handful of companies discovered success developing business models that would not exist if not for the World Wide Web. These include Google's search engine and its system of "relevant advertising", Apple Computer's iTunes web music store and Expedia's web-based travel service. Other companies, while offering traditional services, managed to find a solid Web-based niche and survive the bust; these include Amazon.com (books and media) and eBay (auctions).

This era also brought social networking websites to light, that along with iTunes, are today an extensive part of youth culture, such as MySpace, and also Bebo, Xanga, Friendster, Facebook and orkut.

A New dot-com boom occurred starting in 2004 with first MySpace, and second, the permanent placement of Google in the popular culture spotlight, as well as the rapid popularization of Wikipedia and its sister projects, a website proven revolutionary for promoting the User edited content concept. In 2005, 3 ex-PayPal employees formed a video viewing website called YouTube. Only a year later, YouTube was proven the most quickly popularized website in history, and even started a new concept of user-submitted content in major events, as in the CNN-YouTube Presidential Debates.

The latest extension of the World Wide Web has focused on connecting devices to the Internet, coined Intelligent Device Management. As Internet connectivity becomes more easily accessible, manufacturers have started to leverage the expanded computing power of their devices to enhance their usability and capability. Through Internet connectivity, manufacturers are now able to interact with the devices they have sold and shipped to their customers, monitor device performance, provide enhanced customer support, and offer their customers new complimentary services, even after the products have been shipped to the customer location. A new breed of software companies, such as Questra Corporation, Esprida, Axeda, and NextNine have emerged to leverage the ubiquitous Internet to help manufacturers enhance the products they sell and develop innovative services for their customers.

Source: WikiPedia

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser, or by following a hypertext link to that page or resource. The first step, behind the scenes, is for the server-name part of the URL to be resolved into an IP address by the global, distributed Internet database known as the domain name system, or DNS. The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request to the web server at that IP address. In the case of a typical web page, the HTML text is requested first and parsed by the browser, which then makes additional requests for graphics and any other files that form a part of the page in quick succession. When considering website popularity statistics, these additional file requests give rise to the difference between a single 'page view' and an associated number of server 'hits'.

The web browser then renders the page as described by the HTML, CSS, and other files received, incorporating the images and other resources as necessary. This produces the on-screen page that the viewer sees.

Most web pages will themselves contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloads, source documents, definitions and other web resources.

Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links, is what has been dubbed a "web" of information. Making it available on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (note the name's use of CamelCase, subsequently discarded) in 1990.

Source: WikiPedia

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, published a website in August 1991. Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication (which had been carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer, such as interactive CD-ROM design).

Websites are written in a markup language called HTML, and early versions of HTML were very basic, only giving websites basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different to existing forms of communication - users could easily navigate to other pages by following hyperlinks from page to page.

As the Web and web design progressed, the markup language used to make it became more complex and flexible, giving the ability to add objects like images and tables to a page. Features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layout is increasingly regarded as outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like CSS further changed and enhanced the way the Web is made.

The introduction of Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) into an already interactivity-ready scene has further changed the face of the Web, giving new power to designers and media creators, and offering new interactivity features to users, often at the expense of usability for persons with disabilities, search engine visibility and browser functions available to HTML.

Source: WikiPedia