World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, referred to nowadays as just "the web", is an extraordinary story – more extraordinary even than Google’s.
 
To understand what the web is, you should first of all know it is not synonymous with the internet.  The internet is a world-wide network of computers connected almost invariably by telephone wires or their equivalent.  The word "internet" was coined in 1966 to describe a network of computers within the American Department of Defense. 

The World Wide Web – the web – is a protocol governing how electronic pages (colloquially "web pages") are built and interact with each other.  It uses the internet as its delivery vehicle.   The World Wide Web is software; the internet is hardware.

Another definition.  A "browser" is a program stored on a computer (Internet Explorer is the browser that is supplied free with Windows) that receives the computer code making up a web page, interprets it and then presents the result on a screen.

The World Wide Web is the brain child of Sir Tim Berners-Lee who now heads the 3WC (World Wide Web Consortium) which is recognised as the world authority on the web and how it is used.  Although we assume he now earns a salary doing that job it is remarkable that Sir Tim gave the world his work for nothing – as in "free of charge".  As everyone now knows, this work – essentially today’s "web" – ranks with Google and Microsoft Windows in its impact and influence on the modern world.

Sir Tim had developed a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) which still governs the way web pages are loaded on to web servers – the computers that host websites.  Alongside that he had also developed Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which governs the way web pages are requested and sent. Hypertext sounds very grand and means machine-readable text.  The coding language of a web page he called Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML).  The most important part of the whole project though, was the ability to establish links between pages.  The internet had been in existence for over two decades when Sir Tim was doing his work.  His FTP, HTTP and HTML were just more examples of programs that were commonplace on the then very small internet (which was used almost exclusively by academia, the military and government).  Pages were accessed on remote computers and that was it.  The concept of a group of pages forming something called a website was yet to be made.

What Sir Tim imagined was to make all of the information available on these computers far more accessible, using links from one page to another.   If you retrieve information from a page, it may either state or you may infer, that further, expanded or related information is available from another page.  You then had to leave the first page (modern multi-tab browsers hadn’t even been thought of in those days) and go to the second page. 

Take the Widget Manufacturing Company Limited in pre-web days.   It decides to publish two papers, one on the specification of its widget and one on the maintenance of its widget and its going to put copies on the internet to impress the army procurement department to whom it’s hoping to sell its widgets. 

The army procurement people connect to the Widget Company’s computer (which will have been a long process in pre-web days) and go through whatever is necessary to find the specification paper on that computer.  They then wish to look at the maintenance paper.  They will have to go through the whole process again as there would be nothing linking one paper to the other. 

Sir Tim reasoned that the ability to supply such a link would make a huge difference and so he wrote that into HTML, the computer language he wrote for his new project.  The leap then to supply those links on to something that might be called a Home page was comparatively easy, so that on connection to the Widget computer you could choose which paper to look at.  Navigation as we now know it was invented.  The concept of the website was born.

To show how far we’ve gone I can now click on a link called "Browser" on my desktop then "Amazon" in my Favourites list and then (on the Amazon site) on a tab called "Books" to take me to the main book page on the world’s largest book store with just three mouse-clicks.  What Sir Tim did (taking our third click as an example) was to supply the ability, using his computer code, to show on screen the word "Books" while, hidden from view, was the computer address of the Books page.  At the time of writing that address is http://www.amazon.co.uk/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sa_menu_bo0?ie=UTF8&node=266239&pf_rd_p=218610391&pf_rd_s=left-nav-1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=468294&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=0Q24YA
DB141V6DTB5804 which, apart from the chore of all that typing (It’s 204 characters long), is easy to get wrong.

One can appreciate that Sir Tim, musing on what he’d done, could see a network, a web of links, becoming established across the globe and he called his brain-child the World Wide Web.

The project was launched in 1991.  Initially the browser was called the World Wide Web but that was quickly abandoned so that the name could be used to describe the collection of protocols which now make it up.  The browser code (renamed Nexus) was made open-source so companies could develop their own browsers which have resulted today in Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and several smaller ones.

As a footnote to this, email has never been part of the web and was established thirty years before.  Email is a completely separate program which (usually) happens to use the same domain as a website.   This picture has been slightly blurred recently by the establishment of so-called webmail by which email services use the web to deliver their services rather than a separate program like Outlook Express on the client’s hard disk.  The advantage of webmail is accessibility; wherever there is access to the web one can access one’s email.

It is all very well posting pages to web servers by FTP, retrieving them by HTTP and then having a program to interpret the HTML supplied