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.
© Mike Alexander 2002
* Weaving The Web by Tim Berners-Lee 1999. ISBN 0 75282 090 7
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