In this web page I plan to outline previous developments in The World Wide Web, current standards and possible future standards.
Many people mistakenly believe that The Internet and The World Wide Web are one and the same and as such the two terms have come to be interchangeable in general language. However The World Wide Web would not exist if it weren't for The Internet. The Internet was originally developed for military communications but was later used by academics to communicate. The Internet is essentially an intercontinental network of networks that uses data packets, now commonly encoded using the TCP/IP standard, to transmit data around the globe in milliseconds.
The World Wide Web harnesses the power of The Internet to transmit documents that have been encoded using HTML
The World Wide Web was originally conceived and created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, around 1990, as a method by which the physicists could communicate their research findings, quickly and accurately, to each other.
His development of The World Wide Web began in around 1980 when Berners-Lee proposed a system based on the hypertext referencing method previously used in encyclopedias and dictionaries. During the following 10 years Berners-Lee further developed his system and in the process created the HTTP protocol to control the requests from clients and responses from servers. Berners-Lee also produced the first specification for HTML, the encoding method used for documents on The World Wide Web. By the Christmas of 1990 Tim Berners-Lee had created all of the elements that were required to create, view, distribute, access and maintain the web. He had created:
- The HyperText Transfer Protocol
- The HyperText Markup Language
- A web server for the storage of files that was able to respond to requests sent by clients using the HTTP protocol and respond by transmitting the requested files stored on the server.
- A web browser, called WorldWideWeb, which was able to request files from web servers using the HTTP protocol and use the returned information to render a web page.
- An HTML editor, which was built into WorldWideWeb, capable of producing HTML encoded files for use on The World Wide Web
- The first web pages, which detailed Tim Burners-Lee's development of The World Wide Web
During the early to mid nineties the popularity of The World Wide Web grew. This was due, in part, to the then popular Gopher protocol, developed at the University of Minnesota, introducing licensing fees. The Web's popularity was also helped by the early development of browsers, such as Mosaic, capable of rendering multimedia content.
From the mid to late nineties companies began to realise that the web was a medium by which they could publicise their business and products for free across the world.
Since 1994 The W3 Consortium, headed by Tim Berners-Lee, has been publishing what it calls W3 Recommendations. These recommendations are in fact the standards upon which The World Wide Web is based. Currently there are "at least 12.44 billion indexed pages on the web" (source: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com 23/11/06).
Until recently Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser was used almost exclusively and at one point had a 95% market share. However, since the downfall of Netscape in the late nineties, Mozilla, originally based on the Netscape browser code but since re-written, has been gaining in popularity rapidly and has so far reduced Microsoft's market share to less than 85%. Both companies have recently released new versions of their browsing software. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 introduced, for the first time in the browser, tabbed browsing, a concept originally found in Mozilla's Firefox browser. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 introduced a number of new security features including a phishing blocker which can also be found in Internet Explorer 7.0. Internet Explorer 7.0 continues to fail to adhere to W3 Consortium standards whereas Firefox is fully compliant. Should new standards emerge Mozilla are far more able to make Firefox compliant with those standards as Firefox is an open-source program.
The web is becoming more and more widely available. People are able to access web based content wherever they are via mobile devices such as phones with built in web browsers. Computers are available that can be placed under kitchen cupboards so they may be used to connect to the web to search for recipes. Sky's Sky+ receiver has recently become linked to a web based service that allows subscribers to access a page and select recordings that they wish to be made from their mobile phones. Microsoft has plans to make it's Office software available as a web based service for a fee per use. The World Wide Web is going to become more mobile and more integrated into our lives. Future developments in computer technology will allow the web to become more accessible to more people more of the time.