World Wide Web : Encyclopedia of New Media

The World Wide Web is the Internet application that most people turn to when they want to access or publish information online. Developed beginning in 1989 and released publicly in 1991, the Web allows people to retrieve and publish information through use of a single user interface (the Web browser), a simple word-processing-style publishing language (hypertext markup language, or HTML), and a less simple communication standard (hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP) that specifies how information on the Internet is transmitted and retrieved by controlling how computers issue and respond to requests for information. Reduced to its simplest definition, the Web consists of documents and links to and from documents transmitted over the Internet.

The Web is one of the most revolutionary inventions in history, combining the word-processing abilities, data retrieval-and-storage power, and graphical-display capabilities of the personal computer with the publishing capacity of Gutenberg's printing press. Then it throws in all the possibilities of TV, radio, photography, and animation. In addition, due to the immense growth in its popularity over the course of a decade, the Web has become one of the world's foremost “places” of business, through e-commerce. While a number of researchers and even a few politicians knew such things were possible before it was created, the advent of the World Wide Web suddenly made it clear to the public that the Internet combined the characteristics of all of the media that had come before it, while adding the unique, hypertext-driven power of interactivity to the mix. The Web offered anyone with a computer and the inclination to take advantage of the innovation a chance to become a part of a linked world of information. While the Internet had existed in one form or another since 1969, it was after the introduction of the Web that the Internet became the wildly popular medium that it is today.

Although the two are often confused, the Web is not the Internet, even though the former could not exist without the latter. The Internet is much larger than the Web, and contains many other information exchange applications, including email, file transfer protocol (FTP), Gopher, chat, Telnet, and USENET, among others. None of these are the Web either, although the Web can be and often is used to display them all.

That is the key to the Web: It is a system of organizing, linking, and displaying information in a way that computers all over the world can access, regardless of the operating system they employ, the kind of software they use to render information, the kind of server the information is stored on, or the online network that information is passing through. Today, the Web can even be accessed on personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones as well as computers. Its lack of limitation is by design; the Web was created specifically to foster universal access. The Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote in his book Weaving the Web that he had believed since high school that computers could be much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information. “Inventing the World Wide Web,” he wrote, “involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, web-like way.”

INVENTING THE WEB

The Web wasn't worldwide at its outset. It was initially invented so that a single physics lab in Switzerland, the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), could organize, store, and access reams of research information generated on its many incompatible computer hardware and software systems. Although one might not expect a particle-physics lab to be the source of such a key advance in computing, in fact CERN was an unexpectedly apt proving ground. Over the course of 20 years, CERN had developed a culture based on distributed computing, in which tasks were divided up among computers and researchers, and information was swapped and shared. But there were problems. Distributed computing often involves incompatible software and computer systems that make sharing research a grueling and frustrating task, and that problem was exacerbated by the fact that CERN research teams were usually available on site only for short periods. Many were in Switzerland on two-year grants, and their complex work often disappeared in the cata-combs of CERN's incompatible computer systems.

The Web was Berners-Lee's way out of this mess. He had spent six months at CERN as a programming consultant in 1980, during which time he wrote a program called Enquire that was similar to Apple's HyperCard program for the Macintosh; it allowed subjects to be indexed and stored on a computer through a hierarchy of links. Berners-Lee returned to CERN in 1989 to assist researchers in the daunting task of retrieving and organize the center's often difficult-to-locate research. In March 1989, he wrote his proposal for what would become the World Wide Web.

In many ways, Berners-Lee and his collaborators had to develop the Web furtively. Inventing a worldwide computer network interface was not what Berners-Lee had been hired to do, and he was constantly worried that a superior would at some point assess his work and ask him to stop. He had to see to it that the project addressed CERN's specific needs. What he came up with was a single user interface that could access many classes of computerized information; this was crucial at CERN, where many varieties of incompatible mainframe and personal computers were in use. His first move was to create a searchable phone book for the center that could be easily searched and kept up to date, although that task did not take advantage of the Web's true abilities.

Developing the Web required three primary innovations: a simple protocol that would allow people—as opposed to computers—to request and retrieve information regardless of the system or software they were using; a uniform protocol that both the sending computer and the receiving computer could render and interpret; and a way to legibly display the retrieved information on computer screens.

There was interesting history behind these ideas. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an Atlantic Monthly article that described a theoretical device that he called the “Memex” (memory extension), which would create and follow links between microfiche documents. Later, in 1965, Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext” to describe his “information docuverse,” wherein all the writing ever put down by humans would be published in hypertext form, linked universally to all other information, and be made accessible to all people everywhere, equally. Nelson called this Utopian idea Xanadu, and he began working on it in 1961; it has never been finished. Also, in 1968, Doug Engelbart at Stanford University created and presented a prototype for his “oNLine System” (NLS), which could edit and browse hypertext documents, manage email, and perform other tasks. Engelbart also invented the computer mouse to accompany the NLS.

Berners-Lee's plans for the Web stemmed from all these ideas. However, his plans were more limited in scope and more practical than Nelson's grandiose scheme, which had also included a system of automatic micropayments to be given to all authors whenever their works were accessed. Berners-Lee aimed simply to link documents to other relevant documents, and to make it possible for hyperlinks displayed on a screen to make these documents accessible regardless of where the actual pages were stored. For example, source material referenced in a research report's footnote could be linked to directly, even if the referenced document was stored on some remote server on the other side of the planet. This is a fundamental idea behind the World Wide Web, one that made Berners-Lee's invention truly global in scale.

There is yet another reason why the Web is worldwide. Berners-Lee worked hard convincing his bosses at CERN that his invention should be given away to the public, that it not be patented or turned into a proprietary or for-profit system. He worried that if the Web were made commercial, then competitors would arise, standards would clash, and the whole idea of universal access to documents across computing platforms would be lost. Instead of one Web, there might be three, or 20, or 100 variations on the theme. So Berners-Lee saw to it that the Web's source code was released to the public, so that anyone could work on it, improve it, and use it for free. Had he not insisted on this, users would probably have to pay to access the various networks. It was a decision that most likely prevented Berners-Lee from becoming enormously wealthy in the way that Marc Andreessen became wealthy after creating the Mosaic browser and using the idea to establish the Netscape company. Berners-Lee's selfless choice was made in the interests of the world community as a whole.

It took Berners-Lee about a year to devise the Web from start to finish, a fact that author John Naughton finds astonishing. “Looking back, it is not so much the elegance of Berners-Lee's creation which makes one gasp at its blinding comprehensiveness,” Naughton wrote in A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime (2001). “In just over a year, he took the Web all the way—from original conception to hacking out primitive browsers and servers, to the creation and elaboration of the protocols needed to make the whole thing work. And on the seventh day he rested.”

The Web went public on January 15, 1991, and a “line-mode” browser that was capable only of displaying text was distributed by CERN to a limited number of Internet users so they could view content using the new creation. Those who wished to could dial up CERN over the Internet using “anonymous FTP,” download the line-mode browser, and begin viewing the first rudimentary, text-heavy Web sites. The first browser, also created by Berners-Lee, was also called WorldWideWeb; the name was later changed to Nexus. Crude as it was, Nexus made real the promise of a global hypertext network. Once the Web was out to the public, other researchers began working to improve Berners-Lee's innovation. In January 1993, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undergraduate Marc Andreessen, assisted by friend and fellow National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) staffer Eric Bina and a small team laboring for $6.85 an hour, worked around the clock for three months to unleash Mosaic in the spring of 1993.

Mosaic was the first browser to make it possible for surfers to point and click their way around the Web; Berners-Lee's original browser operated with keystrokes because of the incompatibility of so many computer systems. Mosaic made it possible to view hypertext documents with embedded graphics, to launch sound files, and to open movie clips and other “rich hypermedia.” Just as importantly, it ran on simple PC desktops, rather than requiring high-powered Unix machines (although it ran on those too). For a time in the early 1990s, Mosaic was the Web's most popular browser. Then Andreessen left the NCSA, formed a company with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, and launched the Netscape Navigator browser. The company went public in August 1995 in one of the most lucrative and successful initial public offerings in U.S. history. Netscape's share of the browser market ballooned in four months from zero percent to 75 percent; the World Wide Web had well and truly arrived.

Not long after Netscape's introduction, Microsoft developed and began distributing a competing browser, Internet Explorer, which it gave away for free, drastically undercutting Netscape's business. In 1998, its market share badly eroded, Netscape was bought by America Online.

THE WEB TAKES OFF

In October 1993, the Clinton administration opened the Internet, which had been a U.S. military project, to commercial traffic just as Mosaic was being released. In March of that year, the Web had accounted for 0.1 percent of the traffic on the Internet; by March 1995, several months after Netscape's December 1994 release, that figure had risen to 23.9 percent. FTP traffic, which had accounted for 43.9 percent of the Internet's traffic, was reduced to 24.2 percent of traffic, as measured by the National Science Foundation.

The Web gained momentum throughout the late 1990s. By 1999, it was cruising at stratospheric heights, achieving immense popularity. Within just a few years, every major media operation in existence, from CNN to Time to the St. Paul Pioneer Press was represented on the Web. Meanwhile, millions of average citizens had learned basic HTML programming and published their own home pages detailing their interests, telling their life stories—or, in one man's case, exacting revenge on a former girlfriend by uploading her cajoling and threatening voicemail messages for all the world to hear. Universities, libraries, and museums made substantial portions of their collections available online. If pornography became rampant on the Web, so did more edifying instructional materials from high schools and community colleges.

Another reason for the Web's rise was the recognition among consumers that the Internet was a convenient way to do many kinds of shopping—and the realization among businesses that they could use the Web to extend their brands to customers and even to other businesses that they might otherwise never have had a chance to work with. Major companies like IBM, for instance, reportedly have more than one million pages on the Web. The medium has arisen as a place to transact e-commerce, to listen to and download music, to maintain personal appointment schedules, even to watch movies. By 1999, massive, precariously unprofitable businesses like Amazon.com had become household names, and CEOs like Amazon's Jeff Bezos and eBay's Meg Whitman were new corporate superstars. For a time, the Web resembled nothing so much as the Yukon in Gold Rush days; it seemed that everyone with any kind of idea for doing business on the Web was rewarded with outrageous sums of venture capital to get their businesses started. Stock prices were spiraling to the heavens, and company valuations were approaching free orbit. However, by April 2000, the dot-com bubble burst, and many Web-based companies that could not prove imminent profitability saw their investment money pulled out. Many Web sites died rapid, ignominious deaths, while their employees joined the swelling ranks of the unemployed.

However, despite the shock of that downturn, reverberations of which were still being felt in the world economy at the time of this writing, the Web remains more immensely popular than ever. In August 2001, the Nielsen/NetRatings firm estimated that the Web-Internet population—which is roughly synonymous with the number of Web users—was 459 million people worldwide. The service said that more than 30 million Web surfers had been added to that population during the first quarter of 2001.

The Web's population is not the only thing that can be expected to grow and evolve; the Web itself is destined to undergo significant change—led again, possibly, by Tim Berners-Lee. In a Scientific American article published in May 2001, he wrote of new innovations that he generically called the Semantic Web. “The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users,” wrote Berners-Lee and his coauthors James Hendler and Ora Lassila. In this scheme, Web users will employ software agents to scour special tags encoded into Web sites, which will tell the agents whether the user will find anything on that site interesting or useful. “The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation,” Berners-Lee and his team wrote. The new Semantic Web will rely heavily on two technologies, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), that already exist and are in use.

—Kevin Featherly

Entry Citation:

Featherly, Kevin. "World Wide Web." Encyclopedia of New Media. 2002. SAGE Publications. 4 Apr. 2010. .