THE WORLD WIDE WEB
Perhaps the invention that most facilitated the growth of the Internet as a global information-sharing system is the World Wide Web. Unlike the Internet, however, the early design and development of the World Wide Web was primarily the doing of just one person: Tim Berners-Lee. Working as a contract programmer at the Geneva, Switzerland-based Centre Europen de Recherche Nucleaire (European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or CERN), Berners-Lee repeatedly proposed to develop a global interactive interface for use on the Internet so as to turn the fragmented and relatively exclusive Internet into a popular and seamless whole. After several rejections, Berners-Lee simply developed a prototype using the laboratory's phone-book entries in 1989. Called Enquire Within Upon Everything, the prototype was designed to link and connect elements much in the way that the brain makes random connections and associations. Unlike the average database system, according to Berners-Lee, the Web was to be designed to make random associations between arbitrary objects in the files.
Just as the Internet evolved to ensure the greatest possible flexibility and interoperability, so the Web's original architectural design specifically minimized the degree of specification so as to minimize constraints on the user. In this way, the design could be modified and updated while leaving the basic architecture undisturbed. Thus, for instance, users could enter the existing File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in the address space and it would be as workable as the new Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP was the communications protocol that allowed the Web to transfer data to and from any computer connected to the Internet, and was designed as an improvement on the FTP standard in that it took advantage of the Web's capacity to read and translate intricate features. The intermixing of these protocols and file formats was the key, for Berners-Lee, to ensuring not only the widest proliferation but also the greatest durability of his creation. Not only would the Web in this way be able to evolve with changing systems and protocols, but the early adoption would be made smoother in that users could adopt the Web from whatever systems they were currently using as a parallel or supplementary system. Shortly after the successful demonstration of the phonebook prototype, the Internet community, still relatively esoteric, began experimenting with browser platforms for viewing the Web. One of the early successes was the Mosaic program written by Marc Andreessen, later the founder of Netscape.
Taking advantage of the Internet's gateways and bypassing centralized registries, Berners-Lee devised the universal resource locators (URLs) that are the basis for Web addresses under the DNS. URLs were built to highlight the central power of the Web: that any link can connect to any other document or resource anywhere on the Internet, or in the "universe of information," as Berners-Lee puts it. URLs are structured to identify the kind of space that is being accessed (for instance, by the prefixes "http:" or "ftp:") followed by the specific address within that information space.
The last piece of the WWW puzzle was the medium's lingua franca: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a language of codes, built on hypermedia principles dating back to the 1940s, that informs the browser how to interpret the files for the Web. By 1991, all the elements were in place, and the World Wide Web was released from Berners-Lee's laboratory to the public free of any charge.
Perhaps the biggest story in the development of the Web through the early and mid-1990s was the fight to stave off the fragmentation of Web standards that could potentially undermine the ability of the Web to fulfill its original function-namely, to create a seamless universe of information. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which Berners-Lee was the founder, was born in 1994 just as the Web was beginning to hit critical mass. The organization, though not a governing body, was founded to guide and oversee the Web's development and minimize proprietary battles over standards and protocols in an effort to keep the Web nonproprietary and freely accessible. Based at MIT, the W3C is a neutral organization that brings together technicians, researchers, policy advocates, software vendors, and business interests to compromise on technical standards and specifications to ensure that the Web remains undivided.
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