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The hypermedia technology that makes the
internet usable by mere humans. the World Wide Web, or the web as it is now
commonly known, was originally designed to help workers at cern, a
European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, share information among
themselves using a single, unified interface. Soon the world realised that
the web was of great importance not just to high-energy physicists but also
to people in almost every other sphere of human activity. The web's
subsequent growth can only be described as explosive. In mid-1993, when the
first graphical web browser was launched, there were about 150
websites holding a few thousand web pages. At the beginning of 1995,
there were about 10,000 sites, a number that grew to 4.5m by mid-1999. In
early 2003 a survey by Netcraft received responses from 35m websites
worldwide, and thousands more sites go live every day.
The
technology underlying the web has not changed much since Tim Berners-Lee,
often described as the father of the web, outlined the first versions of
html and http, the two fundamental building blocks of web
technology. What has changed is people's ability to think of new things to
do with it. In conjunction with other tools such as Java and dhtml,
web pages have evolved from mere repositories for static information into
busy, interactive environments where people can shop for gifts, exchange
goods and services, watch films, learn French and communicate with friends
or strangers. those who predicted the decline of the web following the
dotcom debacle are now eating their words; we may not all be using the
web to order our groceries, but its momentum has if anything grown rather
than declined. It may not yet be the "embodiment of human knowledge"
envisaged by Berners-Lee, but at more than 3 billion pages, one for every
second person on earth, it is getting there fast. |
