This article is part of the Emerging Web series which chronicles the rapid evolution of the world wide web in the past, present, and future. Accompanying this series is the New Web Glossary. Words (to be) defined in the glossary are placed in italics on their first appearance. After each post new entries are added.
In the previous post we briefly covered how the global network of networks the Internet came into being. This time around we’ll look at how the number one Internet application, the World Wide Web, was invented.
What originated as a network for US military research had during the 70’s and 80’s gone global, connecting many universities and other sites of scientific research. One of the sites connected to the Internet through the EUnet was the European Center for Particle Physics Research, known as CERN (the abbreviation of the original French name) on the French-Swiss border. Here the World Wide Web was developed during the second half of the 1980’s by the British born Tim Berners-Lee and Belgian Robert Cailiau . The former name you might want to keep in mind, we’ll be meeting him again by the end of the series.
As early as the 1960’s various hypertext systems had been developed. The term itself was coined in 1965 to describe a system to interlink various documents in such a way that on request related documents could swiftly be retrieved and displayed. The motivation for developing such systems was to manage the huge amount of information available to researchers and decision makers. In 1984 Tim Berners-Lee started working on a proposal for such a system, to encourage the sharing of information inside CERN. Robert Cailiau had been working on a similar proposal and the two of them started working together.
One of the core inventions our two visionaries came up with was the URL or Uniform Resource Locator. Anyone connected to the same network had to be able to make information public, and any document had to be able to refer to any other document on the same network. The URL is a way to uniquely identify a document. Given a URL a webbrowser can find, retrieve and display that document. The URL of this site for example is http://www.arnebrasseur.net/. It consists of a protocol, ‘http’, a colon ‘:’, and a protocol specific part.
As mentioned in the previous article and explained more fully in the glossary, a protocol is language plus a set of conventions by which computers can communicate. HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol and was also developed by Berners-Lee and Cailiau. It is the language your webbrowser uses to speak with the webservers that contain the pages you are visiting. A typical message would be : ‘please send page XYZ’. The server will respond with ‘OK, here it is’ or perhaps ‘Page not found’.
The third important invention was the HyperText Markup Language or HTML. One of the intentions was to make information, such as research results, publicly available. Obviously this information is to be read by humans. They also wanted any document to be able to point to any other document. But if the software must be able to follow a link from one document to the next, it has to be able to ’see’ these links first. Somehow a way was needed to structure a document so the software could identify the various parts such as hyperlinks, and if the program is already ‘interpreting’ the document, why not add some more meaning to it that a computer program can deal with to do something useful?
A HTML document is in fact a simple text document, where parts can be marked using HTML tags. These tags can either say something about the appearance (put this text in bold), or about semantics (this is an acronym which stands for …). By 1989 the proposal was finished, and during 1990 Berners-Lee took a month to write the first webbrowser, including a simple editor for hypertext documents. He also wrote a simple webserver and made both publicly available on Usenet. Pretty soon servers started popping up around the world and the rest, as they say, is history. To ensure the freedom of information that they had in mind when the whole project started, Berners-Lee got CERN to put the various parts of the World Wide Web proposal in the public domain. This way anyone could use, share and expand what they had developed.
So how did the web evolve in its early days? What was the first graphical webbrowser? When was the first commercial browser released? What is the W3C and what is its function? All of this and more in our next episode, stay tuned!
New additions to the Glossary : World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailiau, CERN, URL, HTTP, HTML, webbrowser, webserver, Usenet, newsgroup, hypertext, hyperlink, tag, host, website, webpage
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