The Way The World Wide Web Works
Foreword By The Author
The World Wide Web (WWW), unbeknown to many, was actually a European innovation. It was invented by an Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, and was created in 1990 while he was working as a scientist for CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Some people, short on knowledge about how ‘cyberspace’ developed, think he invented the Internet itself, which of course, he definitely did not. The Internet was already in existence (and thriving) and had grown out of ARPAnet, a research network founded (and funded) by the U.S. military. But Internet protocols (the ‘rules’ governing how data is to be transmitted and received) were defined by obscure prefixes such as ‘gopher://’, ‘wais://’, ‘ftp://’, etc. These, and others, are still in use but, because of the WWW, no longer dominate as they once did. Usenet (‘news://’) is still popular though, as is SMTP, one of the original protocols for the most popular (and still fastest growing) of all information dissemination systems, the ever ubiquitous ‘email’.
Mike Alexander
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The Original Internet
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Prior to the WWW, the Internet consisted mainly of thousands of sets of individual files and text-based messages transmitted by the various transport protocols mentioned above. Most were categorized and stored in databases on computers housed in universities across the USA and around the world. They were accessible only by those who understood the protocols and the intimidatory command systems necessary for their operation.
The Birth of the Web
What Tim Berners-Lee introduced to the Internet, and named the World Wide Web, was the ability to ‘link’ data together, whether that data was located in files on the same server or on servers half a world away. He did this by bringing together three main elements: HTTP—the WWW protocol; HTML—the ‘language’ of the web; and the URL system—for ‘addressing’ websites anywhere in the world (a website being simply an area of disk space on a computer). The use of these three elements would transform the Internet into what he called “a single, global information space”. It would allow, for the first time, transmission and retrieval of ‘pages’ that could each consist of many files. These might be graphics files, text files, sound files, or indeed any other type of file, since the only restriction would be in the application that could interpret the language and present the results as viewable pages (these applications came to be known as ‘browsers’). Thus rich, interactive, multimedia documents, each capable of being linked to any other file on the Internet, suddenly became accessible to everyone.
The Vision
His vision of the web was, in his own words, “about anything being potentially connected with anything. It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we (formerly) bound ourselves. It leaves the entirety of our previous ways of working as just one tool among many. It leaves our previous fears for the future as one set among many. And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds.” *
One of the analogies he used to explain what he meant was how a strong smell of coffee could trigger a response in his mind and instantly transport him back to a small room over a corner coffeehouse in Oxford, England, where he once studied. The brain, and therefore the human mind, works by using a web-like structure of connections, or links, he reasoned, and therefore the nearer his ‘global information space’ could come to using a similar structure, the more viable—and versatile—it would be. It would also, like the mind, be the ultimate expression of freedom, with no governing body or stultifying bureaucracy to restrict its development.
The Commercial Web
He foresaw the rise of commercialism on the Internet but welcomed it as inevitable anyway. The anti-commercial bias evident among some academics, particularly those who had used the Internet prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web, was not something he subscribed to.
He was nevertheless wary of the potential for predatory behavior by some parts of the business sector and his work as head of the WWW Consortium, the body set up to lead the web to its full potential, must inevitably have involved pressure being applied to his philosophy from time to time. But his vision was clear and incorruptible. He never considered using his ownership of such unique intellectual property for personal commercial gain. As it turned out though, even he was surprised by the speed and scope of entrepreneurial exploitation of the web. Its potential as a new marketing medium was taken up with almost evangelical fervor and it became firmly established almost overnight.
Newcomers immediately started to get exasperated by the seeming lack of structure they found as they tried to cope with this new non-hierarchical entity. “Who’s in charge of this thing?” marketers asked, and “Where’s the directory of participants?”. This led to the establishment of a whole new industry in its own right, as attempts were frantically made to categorize and map the web.
Search Engines and Portals
Search engines and directories (or portals, as they have come to be known) swiftly came into being and those that gained dominance soon started marketing their services as being indispensable to the ‘surfing’ public. (The irony is that the very term ‘surfing’ sprang from the fact that hopping from one site to another via their links was analogous to the way surfers hopped on a wave not knowing where it would take them but simply to enjoy the ride.) If they were even remotely as reliable as telephone directories, these claims to indispensability might have some justification. But they’re not, and never will be. Both large and small portals and search engines can sometimes be extremely useful tools, of course, but that’s basically all they are, helpful tools, among many other helpful tools. One reason is that the web is growing and evolving at such a phenomenal pace that it’s impossible to keep up with developments. The major search engines and search directories that most people use when trying to find things don’t even come close to categorizing and recording everything. Nor do they, as things are now, have a hope of ever doing so.
Which is one of the reasons why website developers who recognize these facts devote special pages of links to other sites. They understand the non-hierarchical structure of the web, where any data can be linked to any other. So they provide links to other information that their visitors might find useful, thereby enhancing the usefulness of their own site.
The Way Forward
The World Wide Web, precisely as its creator Tim Berners-Lee predicted, has become such a vast and rapidly growing network of sites that practically every topic and subject under the sun is represented on it somewhere.
The fact that there is no official map of what data is available and where it can be found, is sometimes a source of great frustration though, both for users of the Internet, and those who wish to present information for them to find. The surest way to improve the situation for everyone is for website authors and managers to recognize the validity of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision and to respond to link exchange requests in as positive a way as possible. Even the big search engines and portals are at last beginning to recognize the wisdom of doing so. I predict that the number of incoming and outgoing links a site has will soon become a major factor that they will consider when ‘ranking’ it in their search results.
© Mike Alexander 2002
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* Weaving The Web by Tim Berners-Lee 1999. ISBN 0 75282 090 7
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