the Three Protocols - How It All Happened

HOW IT ALL HAPPENED

In 1980, shortly after graduating from Oxford University, Tim Berners-Lee held a temporary software consulting job at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN). There, he experimented with programs, including one called Enquire, which stored information along with links. He developed Enquire as a way of helping himself remember connections between the many people and projects at CERN. After his temporary position ended, Berners-Lee eventually returned to CERN in a more permanent role in 1984. He had a vision of a "global information space" where information on computers throughout the world was linked together. Many of the researchers who worked with CERN were scattered throughout the world. CERN made them submit documents in a special format that was compatible with its own computer system. This caused a great deal of frustration, both for the researchers and the people who were employed at CERN. Consistent with his vision, Berners-Lee proposed creating a web of information that would be in a universal format all could share. This web could contain cross-links between relevant documents, such as research papers. Although the idea generated little initial interest at CERN, Berners-Lee's boss, Mike Sendall, gave him permission to explore his dream there. In response, he created a hypertext-editing program called WorldWideWeb in 1990. The program ran on a machine from NeXT, a computer company started by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and included the Web's three main elements—URLs, HTTP, and HTML—which Berners-Lee created.

The concept of hypertext existed long before Berners-Lee introduced HTTP and HTML. During the 1940s, the concept existed in the academic world. Also, during the 1980s, Apple Computer Programmer Bill Atkinson created a program called Hypercard. According to WC3, the program allowed users "to construct a series of on-screen 'filing cards' that contained textual and graphical information. Users could navigate these by pressing on-screen buttons, taking themselves on a tour of the information in the process. Hypercard set the scene for more applications based on the filing card idea." One limitation to programs like Hypercard was that they were limited to a person's computer system and couldn't be used to access information on other computers or networks in remote locations.

Berners-Lee introduced his WorldWideWeb program, along with the very first Web server (called info.cern.ch), to people in the field of high-energy physics. Later, he introduced WorldWideWeb to people introduced in hypertext and NeXT. At info.cern.ch, the specifications for URLs, HTML, and HTTP were published in order to encourage others to learn about and use them.

After Berner-Lee introduced his creation to the world, it began to take off. However, the browser he made for NeXT was not sufficient for the many people using IBM-PCs, Macintosh computers, and other systems. Development of various point-and-click browsers soon followed. According to ibiblio, "Students at the Helsinki University of Technology wrote Erwise-a browser for Unix machines, and Pei Wei, a U.C. Berkeley student wrote Viola. Colleagues of Berners-Lee at CERN wrote a browser for Mac machines called Samba." In 1992, Dave Thompson and Joseph Hardin of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana's National Center for Supercomputer Applications decided to develop the Mosaic Web browser. Lou Montulli was among the first people to create a text browser, when he released Lynx in March of 1993. That same year, Hewlett-Packard Labs' Dave Raggett created a browser called Arena. In November 1994, Marc Andreessen, who had worked as a programmer on Mosaic, and Jim Clark formed what would eventually become Netscape Communications. Microsoft released its Internet Explorer browser in August of 1995, and along with Netscape went on to dominate the market for Web browsers.

Since Berners-Lee effectively changed the world, the Web has evolved. For example, various versions of HTML, including HTML+, HTML 2, HTML 3.2, HTML 4, have been released. HTML is closely related to another language called Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). In the early 2000s a subset of SGML known as Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) led to the development of XHTML, a hybrid language that combines HTML with XML. XHTML has powerful implications for e-commerce because the language's XML component allows users to share information in a universal, standard way without making the kinds of special arrangements required Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), or the manner in which many large companies exchange electronic data with suppliers and other entities.