This Article Covers the Conception of the World Wide Web
With profound gratitude to the British Pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Information used in this article was current at the time of its writing (2001)
The World Wide Web
Introduction
The Web has a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions.
Through the use hypertext and multimedia techniques, the web is easy for anyone to
roam, browse, and contribute to... (http://www.w3.org/WWW/)
The Inspiration for the World Wide Web started with the following people.
Vannevar Bush
Douglas Engelbart
Theodor (Ted) Nelson
Vannevar Bush
Vannevar Bush was an electrical engineer and inventor, who in the 1930s,
constructed the first analog computer, and sowed the first seed. He was obsessed with
modern science, and wrote an article about how he perceived the future to be. He
considered a future device for individual use. It was like a mechanized private file
and library. He called it the Memex. The idea of this article was that machines would be needed to help humankind, to cope
with the information of the future. This was ultimately to trigger the Web. The article
was shelved until after the Second World War. Atlantic Monthly, an intelligentsia
magazine published it, it was called As We May
Think.
Memex Image
(Courtesy of Open University August 2001)
Douglas C Engelbart
Douglas C. Engelbart read the article by Bush, which remained an inspiration in
his work. After working for NASA for a while, he went onto pursue
his dream, which was to inspire successive generations of computer scientists. He would
devote his life to a crusade to use computer power to augment human capabilities. This,
he achieved, and with his team went onto invent bit-mapped screens, graphics-based
interfaces, multiple windows, and many other things. He also invented the Mouse, used today on millions of desktops worldwide.
Theodor (Ted) Holm Nelson
Another person to whom, the article made an impact was Ted Nelson, a man in
pursuit of his dream, which was the Xanadu project. The idea was all media contents
were to get permanent addresses, which can be addressed by any one independent of their
documentary context. The project has been in development for more than 30 years. The
Xanadu connective structure is extremely different from that of HTML or any system. The
structure consists of both links and transclusions, Nelson made the connection in the
technology needed to drive the associative linking, envisioned by Bush. He came up with
"nonsequential writing." He later coined the term hypertext.
Xanadu project: Example of parallel documents
(Courtesy of www.xanadu.com August 2001)
Why the Need for Change
Pioneers such as Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, and Ted Nelson, started the
idea of the Web. However, it took Tim Berners-Lee to bring it to fruition. He had read,
"Enquire" a book similar to "As We May Think" by Bush. The vision he had of the Web is
about anything, being potentially connected, with anything. He saw the web as an open
challenge.
The goal Berners-Lee wanted to achieve was global communication, for all, not just the
elite. He devised a way of using hyperlinked documents, while working at CERN. In his
spare time, he wrote the program "ENQUIRE" (Using Ideas from the book). It was a
notebook program, which allowed links to be made between arbitrary nodes. Each node had
a title, a type, and a list of bi-directional typed links. It was never published; this
program formed the conceptual basis, for the future development of the World Wide
By 1980, there were many obstacles in the way of exchange information on the Internet.
There were also many computer network systems, but few shared common features. A user
had to understand complicated and inconsistent systems. Big investments had to be made
by users, because information had to be accessed in different ways. There was a great
need to have a way of linking connections on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee dream was to
have computers linking via the Internet worldwide. He achieved this with the hypertext
system, and its protocols.
This image shows why the need for change
(Image Courtesy of www.zelster.com August 2001)
Introduction to Tim Berners-Lee
The Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee changed things forever on the Internet, by
allowing information to be obtained from any source, and in a simple way. He
developed the Hypertext System and protocols, otherwise known as the World Wide
Web. The idea was that documents should be editable by their readers. The system
grew rapidly, and allowed communication globally. Berners-Lee is currently the
director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and he occupies the 3Com Founders
chair, at the M.I.T Laboratory for Computer Science, where he is currently
employed.
Tim Berners-Lee shows an image of an early System Browser
(Image Courtesy of CERN August 2001)
The World Wide Web
(The Development)
Berners-Lee, worked for Cern as a software
engineer in 1989. He proposed a global hypertext project. This was to be known as
the World Wide Web
Hypertext project. Berners-Lee working in collaboration with Robert
Cailliau in 1990, went onto develop the protocols i.e. (HTTP) Hypertext Transfer
Protocol, (URL) Uniform Resource Locator, and (HTML) Hypertext Mark-up language. One
of the main features of the World Wide Web documents is their hypertext
structure.
Hypertext Structure
(Courtesy www.zelster.com August 2001)
Hypertext is a way to link, and access information of various kinds, as a web of
nodes, in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user interface
to large classes of information reports, notes, databases, computer
documentation, and on-line help. In November 1990 Berners-Lee and Cailliau wrote
the first WWW client, a
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) hypertext browser/editor that ran using NeXTStep, it was very
sophisticated but only available on NeXT machines which was not wholly suitable to their needs. They needed a browser that
would function on non-graphical displays. Nicola Pellow (an English graduate
student) achieved this by writing a simple Line-Mode
browser.
CERN launched the Web in 1991. It was clear that the small team at CERN,
could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee
put a plea out via the Internet for other developers to join in. Marc Andreessen,
and Eric Bina, working for the National Center for Supercomputer Applications
(NSCA), took up the plea; in 1993, they had released their first version of a
Mosaic browser, this Mosaic version was created in under three months, it had
multiplied tenfold in little over five months. The software ran in the X Window
System environment.
The idea of a browser is as a software tool, for viewing and navigating, through
a web of hypertext documents like a Mosiac Browser. Andreessen was interested in
combining the existing Internet framework, with the multimedia applications made
available by hypertext, and the World Wide Web. At the time, it was difficult to
find and access documents on the Internet. It was then necessary to learn the
usage of such programs as FTP, Gopher, and Telnet, to utilize the Internet.
The Impact
The impact of the World Wide Web on the world has been phenomenal. Tim
Berners-Lee provided a global communication system, which has been likened to a
giant database. Last year Internet firms spent 293m in the UK. At the end of May
of this year, the numbers of homes connected to the net is 10 million - up from 6
million a year earlier. The figures mean that every eight seconds one UK
household is connected to the Internet for the first time. In turn, they log onto
the hypertext language, to browse the World Wide Web. 429 Million People
worldwide have Internet access.
Conclusions
Against the World Wide Web
Ted Nelson has a different view of the Web:"Word processing is a
completely warped process," he says - "Windows 95 is little more
than Scrabble tiles, with font sugar on top." He goes on to call the Web.
"Wonderful for people who like unfinished writing." In an article from
Xanalogical Media Nelson stated. "The World Wide Web is a delivery system for
separate closed units - a system that allows only embedded links pointing
outward. This is simple but naive - creating a tangle of ever-breaking one-way
links, breaking whenever documents are moved, or modified." It would be in the
greater interest of the industry if Nelson's work had reached completion, for
without the inventor, we would have no comparison and without comparison,
progress would stand still.
Reasons for the World Wide Web
Without the World Wide Web being in the public domain, access would be
denied to the average person. If any company, or person, had owned the World Wide
Web, its growth would have become stunted. Berners-Lee designed the World Wide
Web and deliberately kept it Non-Proprietary, and Free. The Web
should remain an open standard for all to use. It started elitist but rapidly
turned into a mass medium. From the start Berners-Lee was convinced HTML, would be the only language
to survive the future. The World Wide Web Consortium and Berners-Lee have as
their goal the need to lead the Web to its full potential. The Consortium is
always looking for ways to improve the hypertext system; they see the future as
needing to use the following programmes, SVG: Scalable Vector
GraphicsXML SignatureRDF-Model
Data and much more.
The World Wide Web is global, allowing for growth in any sector. New ideas are
thought of all the time, with input from even the smallest countries.
Communication is the key, allowing it to be so prolific; which is just as
Berners-Lee had envisaged it. Progress does not stand still; it is made by a
combination of a person(s) idea, triggering another idea. Inventions, which are
overlooked or rejected, can sometimes be adopted years later (maybe Xanadu?). The
celebrated historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, called this mindset a paradigm
(Ref: Open University T171: Module 3: Ref: 2.3 Deep Background: 3c). The Future:
Could be a programme called IT? Alternatively, it could be the popular Open
Source software operating system "Linux." Whatever it is, we owe it
to these men of vision to be "Open to suggestion and forward thinking."
References
Information gathered for this article can be found using the following
links.
The information gathered, has been mainly obtained from the World Wide Web,
and from the T171 course work from The Open University. I also used the book
"Where wizards stay up late." Author's Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon a Touchstone
book: Published by Simon and Schuster.
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