About the World-Wide Web
I played with the
line mode browser
back in the dawn of web time,
because I was looking for usenet access.
It kept hanging my vt100 so I sent in a bug report.
Tim
Berners-Lee responded by email and asked what I thought of
his www idea.
Well, I was developing Motif GUIs and this crappy broken teletype
"browser" with the pretentious name ('World-Wide Web' indeed!)
looked like some research student's desperate attempt to come up with
a Phd thesis - so I gave up on it, and never responded. Oh well..
I believe that releasing the line mode browser (LMB) was probably the
worst thing that we ever did for the Web: the NeXTstep browser-editor
was so much better, and the LMB was just our "patch". Porting the
beautiful NeXT version was a real disheartening nightmare: too much
work. So Nicola Pellow ( a technical student) wrote the LMB purely to
have something portable. I spent a year trying to get a browser-editor
going on the Mac, and I won't even tell you the nightmare on the PCs
(they did not even have tcp/ip, you had to buy it!).
I think the LMB badly backfired, because people were seeing the web
through that little key-hole. All subsequent browsers had only one
window and were not editors. People thought they had made "great"
improvements by introducing fonts and styles, whereas not only did we
already have that, but we also could edit with it. What a mess...
He goes on to ask:
If you have firsthand experience with the influence of the LMB on the
development of the Web, please e-mail him at
robert.cailliau@cern.ch.
What is the World-Wide Web ?
The World-Wide Web,
a distributed hypertext-based information system developed at
CERN,
is a globally interconnected network of hypermedia information
based on
- the Internet
- a standard protocol (HTTP)
- a standard format for describing the structure of documents
(HTML).
for transmission of hypermedia documents,
- a set of
servers
that respond to requests from
- browsers
(or clients) for those documents.
WWW also interfaces with other
standard protocols (FTP, Telnet, NNTP,
WAIS, gopher, ...) and their data formats.
When I started to use the
Internet, many years ago,
one had to use arcane UNIX guru commands (telnet, FTP, ...)
to move data from one place to another.
Then, in 1993, a colleague showed me a
hypertext browser called
Mosaic.
I thought it would make a good Help subsystem for the
astrophysics data retrieval system I was about to build.
A couple of weeks later, I realised it could do the whole thing..
Hypertext, Hypermedia, Hyperlinks..
Web pages use hypertext to display links to other pages.
Clicking on these links 'takes' you directly to other pages on the Web.
A hyperlink is a segment of text (word or phrase), or an inline
image (an image displayed as part of the document) that refers to
another document (text, sound, image, movie) elsewhere on the
World-Wide Web.
Hyperlinks in a document are indicated in some way, e.g.
- in a graphical interface,
- by color & underlining for text;
- or by a colored border for an image;
- an audio clip might be represented by a speaker icon.
- in a text-based interface, by a number immediately afterwards.
When a hyperlink is selected
(by mouse click in a GUI, or entering the
given number at a prompt in a text interface), the referenced document
is fetched from the Internet, and is displayed appropriately
(e.g. if its audio, and your PC, Mac or workstation is
appropriately configured, the sound is played through a speaker).
You can also access other tools of the Internet, such as FTP and
Gopher, to help you explore and access Web resources.
Here's how it all works:
- Running a Web client,
the user selects a hyperlink (containing a
URL) to another document.
- The Web client connects to a machine identified by a network address
(in the URL) on the Internet and asks that machine's Web server
for that document.
A
server
is program on the Web that responds to requests from browsers for
documents.
A Web
server
is an application whose objective is to serve
documents to other machines when asked to.
- The server answers by transferring the document and any other media
inside that document (images, audios, or movies) to the user's display.
The language
that Web clients and servers use to talk with each other is called the
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The term "World-Wide Web" is frequently used to refer to the
network of servers speaking HTTP as well as the world-wide body of
information provided using the language.
Tim Berners-Lee implemented the HTTP protocol in 1990-1 at
CERN,
the European Center for High-Energy Physics in Geneva, Switzerland.
He is now director of the
World-Wide Web Consortium
(W3C), an industry consortium which develops common standards for the
evolution of the Web by producing specifications and reference software.
Many companies and organizations find it useful to establish a 'web
presence',
e.g. to sell their products or just to tell you about themselves.
Individuals can also develop their own personal Web pages.
There are now some 50 million web pages, and one problem faced by
everyone who wants their web site or pages to be effective, is
How in the Web will they Find me?.
How I Almost Became W3C's Webmaster
Anecdotes Redux.
Since the early days, when the LMB played such an uninfluential
rôle, the web has exploded beyond anyone's wildest imagination.
I've given up my
career
in scientific software development and made my
business evangelising the web. I've met TimBL a couple of times and
delivered seminars for the W3C and other organisations. Hey, let me
tell you about the first HTML seminar I ever did..
It was in Orlando FL. My seminar was about (and has always been since
then) 'advanced HTML'. I like to be able to walk around and gesticulate
while talking to my audience and so I asked for a volunteer 'mouse
handler'. A tall young man at the back of the room shot up his hand and
I invited him to take a seat at the computer. As he sat down I asked
him his name. "Dan Connolly", came the reply..
In case you don't know,
Dan
was the editor of the
HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866)
specification, and he has and continues to play a huge rôle in
the development of
HTML.
If anyone knew HTML, it was Dan - and he was
listening to my seminar! How scary can it get..
But, I guess I didn't do too badly, I've met Dan several times since,
and given seminars on advanced HTML in the W3C's
International World Wide Web Conferences.
The story comes full circle with Dan trying to get me to join the W3C
as their webmaster. I went up to Boston and spent half a day with him
and Tim and I finally told him what I thought of his WWW idea..
I didn't get the job, but heck, wouldn't everybody rather be
webmaster for The WDVL ?
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