[Summary]
The World Wide Web was invented in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
(European Center for Nuclear Research, that later became the European
Organization 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."