[Summary]
The World Wide Web was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
(European Center for Nuclear Research), Geneva, Switzerland. In
1989, Tim Berners-Lee networked documents using hypertext. In 1990,
he developed the first HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) server
and the first web browser. In 1991, the web was operational and
radically changed the way people were using the internet.
Hypertext links allowed us to move from one textual or visual
document to another with a simple click of the mouse. Information
became interactive, thus more attractive to many users. Later on,
this interactivity was further enhanced with hypermedia links that
could link texts and images with video and sound. The World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 to develop
protocols for the web.
***
The World Wide Web was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, a
researcher at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research), Geneva,
Switzerland, who made the internet accessible to all.
# How the web started
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee networked documents using hypertext. In
1990, he developed the first HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
server and the first web browser. In 1991, the web was operational
and made the internet accessible to all. Hypertext links allowed
us to move from one textual or visual document to another with a
simple click of the mouse. Information became interactive, thus
more attractive to many users. Later on, this interactivity was
further enhanced with hypermedia links that could link texts and
images with video and sound.
Developed by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
at the University of Illinois (USA) and distributed free of charge
in November 1993, Mosaic was the first browser for the general
public, and contributed greatly to the development of the web. In
early 1994, part of the Mosaic team migrated to the Netscape
Communications Corporation to develop a new browser called
Netscape Navigator. In 1995, Microsoft launched its own browser,
the Internet Explorer. Other browsers were launched then, like
Opera and Safari, Apple's browser.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 to
develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines,
software, other tools) for the web, for example specifications for
markup languages (HTML, XML and others). It also acted as a forum
for information, commerce, communication and collective
understanding. In 1998, the section
Internationalization/Localization gave access to some protocols
for creating a multilingual website: HTML, base character set, new
tags and attributes, HTTP, language negotiation, URLs and other
identifiers including non-ASCII characters, etc.
# Tim Berners-Lee’s dream
Pierre Ruetschi, a journalist for the Swiss daily “Tribune de
Genève”, asked Tim Berners-Lee on 20 December 1997: "Seven years
later, are you satisfied with the way the web has evolved?". He
answered that, if he was pleased with the richness and diversity
of information, the web still lacked the power planned in its
original design. He would like "the web to be more interactive,
and people to be able to create information together", and not
only to be information consumers. The web was supposed to become a
"medium for collaboration, a world of knowledge that we share."
In an essay posted on his webpage, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in May
1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space
in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality
is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything,
be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.
There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web
being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in
fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play
and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions
was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it,
make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and
how we can better work together." (excerpt from "The World Wide
Web: A very short personal history")
# The web 2.0
According to Netcraft, a company tracking data on the internet,
the number of websites went from one million (April 1997) to 10
million (February 2000), 20 million (September 2000), 30 million
(July 2001), 40 million (April 2003), 50 million (May 2004), 60
million (March 2005), 70 million (August 2005), 80 million (April
2006), 90 million (August 2006) and 100 million (November 2006),
with a growing number of personal websites and blogs.
The term “web 2.0” was invented in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly, a
publisher of computer books, as a title for a series of
conferences he was organizing. The web 2.0 may begin to answer Tim
Berners-Lee’s dream as a web based on community and sharing, with
many collaborative projects across borders and languages.
Fifteen years after the invention the web, Wired stated in its
August 2005 issue that less than half of the web was commercial,
with the other half being run by passion. As for the internet,
according to the French daily Le Monde dated 19 August 2005, its
three powers -- ubiquity, variety and interactivity -- made its
potential use quasi infinite.
Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University,
Pennsylvania, and the founder of A Web of Online Dictionaries in
1995, wrote as early as September 1998: "The web will be an
encyclopedia of the world by the world for the world. There will
be no information or knowledge that anyone needs that will not be
available. The major hindrance to international and interpersonal
understanding, personal and institutional enhancement, will be
removed. It would take a wilder imagination than mine to predict
the effect of this development on the nature of humankind."