The Way The World Wide Web Works
The Growth of the Internet
The World Wide Web, 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'.
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
* Weaving The Web by Tim Berners-Lee 1999. ISBN 0 75282 090 7
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