 The Web's former logo byRobert Cailliau | |
| Inventor | Tim Berners-Lee |
|---|---|
| Inception | 12 March 1989; 36 years ago (1989-03-12) |
| History of computing |
|---|
 |
| Hardware |
| Software |
| Computer science |
| Modern concepts |
| By country |
| Timeline of computing |
| Glossary of computer science |
The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or simply "the Web") is a globalinformation medium that users can access viacomputers connected to theInternet. The term is often used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just asemail andvideoconferencing do. Thehistory of the Internet and thehistory of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working atCERN in 1989. He proposed a "universal linked information system" using several concepts and technologies, the most fundamental of which was the connections that existed between information.[1][2] He developed the firstweb server, the firstweb browser, and a document formatting protocol, calledHypertext Markup Language (HTML). After publishing the markup language in 1991, and releasing the browser source code for public use in 1993, many other web browsers were soon developed, withMarc Andreessen'sMosaic (laterNetscape Navigator) being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the Internet boom of the 1990s. It was a graphical browser which ran on several popular office and home computers, bringing multimedia content to non-technical users by including images and text on the same page.
Websites for use by the general public began to emerge in 1993–94. This spurred competition in server and browser software, highlighted in theBrowser wars which was initially dominated by Netscape Navigator andInternet Explorer. Following the complete removal of commercial restrictions on Internet use by 1995, commercialization of the Web amidst macroeconomic factors led to thedot-com boom and bust in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The features of HTML evolved over time, leading to HTML version 2 in 1995, HTML3 and HTML4 in 1997, andHTML5 in 2014. The language was extended with advanced formatting inCascading Style Sheets (CSS) and withprogramming capability byJavaScript.AJAX programming delivered dynamic content to users, which sparked a new era inWeb design, styledWeb 2.0. The use ofsocial media, becoming commonplace in the 2010s, allowed users to compose multimedia content without programming skills, making the Web ubiquitous in everyday life.
The underlying concept ofhypertext as auser interface paradigm originated in projects in the 1960s, from research such as theHypertext Editing System (HES) byAndries van Dam at Brown University,IBM Generalized Markup Language,Ted Nelson'sProject Xanadu, andDouglas Engelbart'soN-Line System (NLS).[3][page needed][non-primary source needed] Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired byVannevar Bush'smicrofilm-basedmemex, which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".[4][title missing][5] Other precursors wereFRESS andIntermedia.Paul Otlet's projectMundaneum has also been named as an early 20th-century precursor of the Web.
In 1980,Tim Berners-Lee, at theEuropean Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, builtENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to experiment with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to another page.[6][7][8] When Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE, the ideas developed by Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson did not influence his work, since he was not aware of them. However, as Berners-Lee began to refine his ideas, the work of these predecessors would later help to confirm the legitimacy of his concept.[9][10]
During the 1980s, manypacket-switched data networks emerged based on variouscommunication protocols (seeProtocol Wars). One of these standards was theInternet protocol suite, which is often referred to as TCP/IP. As theInternet grew through the 1980s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and use information. By 1985, theDomain Name System (upon which theUniform Resource Locator is built) came into being.[11][better source needed][failed verification] Many small, self-contained hypertext systems were created, such as Apple Computer'sHyperCard (1987).
Berners-Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December, but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and considered its problems of information management: physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet they lacked common machines and any shared presentation software. Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN,TCP/IP protocols were installed on Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe. In 1988, the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was established and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.[12] He was inspired by a book,Enquire Within upon Everything. Manyonline services existed before the creation of the World Wide Web, such asCompuServe,Usenet,[13]Internet Relay Chat,[14]Telnet[15] andbulletin board systems.[16] Before the internet,UUCP was used for online services such ase-mail,[17] andBITNET was also another popular network.[18]
While working atCERN,Tim Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers.[19] On 12 March 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled "Information Management: A Proposal",[1][20] to the management at CERN. (At the beginning of chapter 12 of his 2025 book, Berners-Lee confides that "the first document reads only 'March 1989'" — that he gave "12 March — which is actually my mother's birthday.") The proposal used the term "web" and was based on "a large hypertext database with typed links". It described a system called "Mesh" that referencedENQUIRE, the database and software project he had built in 1980, with a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded as text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with thenetwork address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the wordhypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. Berners-Lee notes the possibility of multimedia documents that include graphics, speech and video, which he termshypermedia.[1][2]
Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his manager, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquiredNeXT workstation. He considered several names, includingInformation Mesh,The Information Mine orMine of Information, but settled onWorld Wide Web. Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiastRobert Cailliau who began to promote the proposed system throughout CERN. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate his vision.
Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his bookWeaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested to members of both technical communities that a marriage between the two technologies was possible. But, when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:
With help from Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "hypertext project" calledWorldWideWeb (abbreviated "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using aclient–server architecture.[22][23] The proposal was modelled after theStandard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) readerDynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from theInstitute for Research in Information and Scholarship atBrown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration.[citation needed]
At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the firstweb server was about a month from completing its first successful test. Berners-Lee's proposal estimated that a read-only Web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available".
By December 1990, Berners-Lee and his work team had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: theHyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), theHyperText Markup Language (HTML), the firstweb browser (namedWorldWideWeb, which was also aweb editor), the firstweb server (later known asCERN httpd) and the firstweb site (https://info.cern.ch/) containing the firstweb pages that described the project itself was published on 20 December 1990.[24][25] The browser could accessUsenet newsgroups andFTP files as well. ANeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the web server and also to write the web browser.[26]
Working with Berners-Lee at CERN,Nicola Pellow developed the first cross-platform web browser, theLine Mode Browser.[27]
In January 1991, the first web servers outside CERN were switched on. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on thenewsgroupalt.hypertext, inviting collaborators.[28]
Paul Kunz from theStanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarianLouise Addis adapted it for theVM/CMS operating system on theIBM mainframe as a way to host theSPIRES-HEP database and display SLAC's catalog of online documents.[29][30][31][32] This was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America.[33]
The World Wide Web had several differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn, presented the chronic problem oflink rot.
The WorldWideWeb browser only ran onNeXTSTEP operating system. This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992,[34] and alleviated in April 1992 by the release ofErwise, an application developed at theHelsinki University of Technology, and in May byViolaWWW, created byPei-Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. ViolaWWW was originally an application forHyperCard.[35] Both programs ran on theX Window System forUnix. In 1992, the first tests between browsers on different platforms were concluded successfully between buildings 513 and 31 in CERN, between browsers on the NexT station and the X11-ported Mosaic browser. ViolaWWW became the recommended browser at CERN. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers. The Web was successful at CERN and spread to other scientific and academic institutions.
Students at theUniversity of Kansas adapted an existing text-only hypertext browser,Lynx, to access the web in 1992. Lynx was available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers, unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a website not accessible through Lynx was not worth visiting.[citation needed]
In these earliest browsers, images opened in a separate "helper" application.
In the early 1990s, Internet-based projects such asArchie,Gopher,Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Gopher was a document browsing system for the Internet, released in 1991 by theUniversity of Minnesota. Invented byMark P. McCahill, it became the first commonly used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were not sent as hypertext, they were rendered as hypertext links, that would allow the user to navigate to the resource by following the link.[36] In less than a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers.[37] It offered a viable alternative to the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the consensus was that Gopher would be the primary way that people would interact with the Internet.[38][39] However, in 1993, the University of Minnesota declared that Gopher was proprietary and would have to be licensed.[37]
In response, on 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due, and releasedtheir code into the public domain.[40][41] This made it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.[citation needed] Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this spurred the development ofvarious browsers which precipitated a rapid shift away from Gopher.[42] By releasing Berners-Lee's invention for public use, CERN encouraged and enabled its widespread use.[43]
Early websites intermingled links for both theHTTP web protocol and theGopher protocol, which provided access to content throughhypertext menus presented as afile system rather than throughHTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided bysearch engines.
After 1993 the World Wide Web saw many advances to indexing and ease of access through search engines, which often neglected Gopher and Gopherspace. As its popularity increased through ease of use, incentives for commercial investment in the Web also grew. By the middle of 1994, the Web was outcompeting Gopher and the other browsing systems for the Internet.[44]
TheNational Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) established a website in November 1992. AfterMarc Andreessen, a student at UIUC, was shown ViolaWWW in late 1992,[35] he began work onMosaic with another UIUC studentEric Bina, using funding from theHigh-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a US-federal research and development programinitiated by US Senator Al Gore.[45][46][47] Andreessen and Bina released a Unix version of the browser in February 1993; Mac and Windows versions followed in August 1993. The browser gained popularity due to its strong support of integratedmultimedia, and the authors' rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.[35] Historians generally agree that the 1993 introduction of the Mosaic web browser was a turning point for the World Wide Web.[48][49][50]
Before the release of Mosaic in 1993, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages, and the Web was less popular than older protocols such as Gopher and WAIS. Mosaic could display inline images[51] and submitforms[52][53] for Windows, Macintosh and X-Windows. NCSA also developedHTTPd, a Unix web server that used theCommon Gateway Interface to process forms andServer Side Includes for dynamic content. Both the client and server were free to use with no restrictions.[54] Mosaic was an immediate hit;[55] its graphical user interface allowed the Web to become by far the most popular protocol on the Internet. Within a year, web traffic surpassed Gopher's.[37]Wired declared that Mosaic made non-Internet online services obsolete,[56] and the Web became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet.[citation needed]
The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet.[57] Although the two terms are sometimesconflated in popular use,World Wide Web is notsynonymous withInternet.[58] The Web is aninformation space containing hyperlinked documents and otherresources, identified by their URIs.[59] It is implemented as both client and server software using Internet protocols such asTCP/IP andHTTP.
In keeping with its origins at CERN, early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such asSLAC andFermilab. By January 1993 there were fifty web servers across the world.[60] By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online, including somenotable websites.[61]
Practical media distribution andstreaming media over the Web was made possible by advances indata compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. Following the introduction of the Web, several media formats based ondiscrete cosine transform (DCT) were introduced for practical media distribution and streaming over the Web, including theMPEGvideo format in 1991 and theJPEGimage format in 1992. The high level ofimage compression made JPEG a good format for compensating slowInternet access speeds, typical in the age ofdial-up Internet access. JPEG became the most widely used image format for the World Wide Web. A DCT variation, themodified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm, led to the development ofMP3, which was introduced in 1991 and became the first popularaudio format on the Web.
In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, withdrew support of Berners-Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as results and comments from CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT resources. Following this decision, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN for theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to develop HTTP.[citation needed]
The firstMicrosoft Windows browser wasCello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute atCornell Law School to provide legal information, since access to Windows was more widespread amongst lawyers than access to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.
The rate of web site deployment increased sharply around the world, and fostered development of international standards for protocols and content formatting.[62] Berners-Lee continued to stay involved in guiding web standards, such as themarkup languages to compose web pages, and he advocated his vision of aSemantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) based around machine-readability and interoperability standards.
In May 1994, thefirst International WWW Conference, organized byRobert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since.
TheWorld Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September/October 1994 in order to create open standards for the Web.[63] It was founded at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from theDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet. A year later, a second site was founded atINRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from theEuropean Commission; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan atKeio University.
W3C comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made the Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. Netscape and Microsoft, in the middle of abrowser war, ignored the W3C and added elements to HTML ad hoc (e.g.,blink andmarquee). Finally, in 1995, Netscape and Microsoft came to their senses and agreed to abide by the W3C's standard.[64]
The W3C published the standard forHTML 4 in 1997, which includedCascading Style Sheets (CSS), giving designers more control over the appearance of web pages without the need for additional HTML tags. The W3C could not enforce compliance so none of the browsers were fully compliant. This frustrated web designers who formed theWeb Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998 with the goal of cajoling compliance with standards.[65]A List Apart andCSS Zen Garden were influential websites that promoted good design and adherence to standards.[66] Nevertheless, AOL halted development of Netscape[67] and Microsoft was slow to update IE.[68]Mozilla andApple both released browsers that aimed to be more standards compliant (Firefox andSafari), but were unable to dislodge IE as the dominant browser.
_(page_62_crop).jpg)
As the Web grew in the mid-1990s,web directories and primitivesearch engines were created to index pages and allow people to find things. Commercial use restrictions on the Internet were lifted in 1995 whenNSFNET was shut down.
In the US, the online serviceAmerica Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser, using a dial-up Internet connection. In January 1994,Yahoo! was founded byJerry Yang andDavid Filo, then students atStanford University.Yahoo! Directory became the first popularweb directory.Yahoo! Search, launched the same year, was the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential example of afirst mover on the Web.
Online shopping began to emerge with the launch ofAmazon's shopping site byJeff Bezos in 1995 andeBay byPierre Omidyar the same year.
By 1994, Marc Andreessen'sNetscape Navigator superseded Mosaic in popularity, holding the position for some time. Bill Gates outlinedMicrosoft's strategy to dominate the Internet in his Tidal Wave memo in 1995.[69] With the release ofWindows 95 and the popularInternet Explorer browser, many public companies began to develop a Web presence. At first, people mainly anticipated the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information. By the late 1990s, the directory model had given way to search engines, corresponding with the rise ofGoogle Search, which developed new approaches torelevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.
Netscape had a very successful IPO valuing the company at $2.9 billion despite the lack of profits and triggering thedot-com bubble.[70] Increasing familiarity with the Web led to the growth of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. Manydot-com companies, displaying products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web. Over the next 5 years, over a trillion dollars was raised to fund thousands of startups consisting of little more than a website.
During thedot-com boom, many companies vied to create a dominantweb portal in the belief that such a website would best be able to attract a large audience that in turn would attractonline advertising revenue. While most of these portals offered a search engine, they were not interested in encouraging users to find other websites and leave the portal and instead concentrated on "sticky" content.[71] In contrast, Google was a stripped-down search engine that delivered superior results.[72] It was a hit with users who switched from portals to Google. Furthermore, withAdWords, Google had an effective business model.[73][74]
AOL bought Netscape in 1998.[75] In spite of their early success, Netscape was unable to fend off Microsoft.[76]Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely replaced it.
Fasterbroadband internet connections replaced many dial-up connections from the beginning of the 2000s.
With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many web portals either scaled back operations, floundered,[77] or shut down entirely.[78][79][80] AOL disbanded Netscape in 2003.[81]
Web server software was developed to allow computers to act asweb servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications.Web framework software enabled building and deploying web applications.Content management systems (CMS) were developed to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them were built on top of separatecontent management frameworks.
AfterRobert McCool joined Netscape, development on theNCSA HTTPd server languished. In 1995,Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements toHTTPd.[82] They called their version of HTTPd,Apache.[83] Apache quickly became the dominant server on the Web.[84] After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages includingPerl,PHP andPython. Together withLinux andMySQL, it became known as theLAMP platform.
Following the success of Apache,the Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 and produced manyopen sourceweb software projects in the same collaborative spirit.
After graduating from UIUC, Andreessen andJim Clark, former CEO ofSilicon Graphics, met and formedMosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994 to develop the Mosaic Netscape browser commercially. The company later changed its name toNetscape, and the browser was developed further asNetscape Navigator, which soon became the dominant web client. They also released theNetsite Commerce web server which could handleSSL requests, thus enablinge-commerce on the Web.[85] SSL became the standard method to encrypt web traffic. Navigator 1.0 also introducedcookies, but Netscape did not publicize this feature. Netscape followed up withNavigator 2 in 1995 introducingframes,Java applets andJavaScript. In 1998, Netscape made Navigator open source and launchedMozilla.[86]
Microsoft licensed Mosaic fromSpyglass and releasedInternet Explorer 1.0 that year andIE2 later the same year. IE2 added features pioneered at Netscape such as cookies, SSL, and JavaScript. Thebrowser wars became a competition for dominance when Explorer was bundled with Windows.[87][88] This led to theUnited States v. Microsoft Corporation antitrust lawsuit.
IE3, released in 1996, added support for Java applets,ActiveX, andCSS. At this point, Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows. IE3 managed to increase Microsoft's share of the browser market from under 10% to over 20%.[89]IE4, released the following year, introducedDynamic HTML, setting the stage for the Web 2.0 revolution. By 1998, IE was able to capture the majority of the desktop browser market.[76] It would be the dominant browser for the next fourteen years.
Google released theirChrome browser in 2008 with the firstJITJavaScript engine,V8. Chrome overtook IE to become the dominant desktop browser in four years,[90] and overtook Safari to become the dominant mobile browser in two.[91] At the same time, Google open sourced Chrome'scodebase asChromium.[92]
Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine in 2009 to power anevent drivenruntime system,Node.js, which allowed JavaScript code to be used on servers as well as browsers. This led to the development of new software stacks such asMEAN. Thanks to frameworks such asElectron, developers can bundle up node applications as standalone desktop applications such asSlack.
Acer and Samsung began sellingChromebooks, cheap laptops runningChromeOS capable of running web apps, in 2011. Over the next decade, more companies offered Chromebooks. Chromebooks outsold MacOS devices in 2020 to become the second most popular OS in the world.[93]
Other notable web browsers emerged includingMozilla'sFirefox,Opera'sOpera browser andApple'sSafari.
Web 1.0 is aretronym referring to the first stage of theWorld Wide Web's evolution, from roughly 1989 to 2004. According to Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy, "content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content".[94]Personal web pages were common, consisting mainly of static pages hosted onISP-runweb servers, or onfree web hosting services such asTripod and the now-defunctGeoCities.[95][96]
Some common design elements of a Web 1.0 site include:[97]
Terry Flew, in his third edition ofNew Media, described the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 as a
"move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on "tagging" website content usingkeywords (folksonomy)."
Flew believed these factors formed the trends that resulted in the onset of the Web 2.0 "craze".[100]
Web pages were initially conceived as structured documents based upon HTML. They could include images, video, and other content, although the use of media was initially relatively limited and the content was mainly static. By the mid-2000s, new approaches to sharing and exchanging content, such asblogs andRSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. The video-sharing websiteYouTube launched the concept of user-generated content.[101] As new technologies made it easier to create websites that behaved dynamically, the Web attained greater ease of use and gained a sense of interactivity which ushered in a period of rapid popularization. This new era also brought into existencesocial networking websites, such asFriendster,MySpace,Facebook, andTwitter, and photo- and video-sharing websites such asFlickr and, later,Instagram which gained users rapidly and became a central part ofyouth culture.Wikipedia'suser-edited content quickly displaced the professionally-writtenMicrosoft Encarta.[102] The popularity of these sites, combined with developments in the technology that enabled them, and the increasing availability and affordability of high-speed connections made video content far more common on all kinds of websites. This new media-rich model for information exchange, featuring user-generated and user-edited websites, was dubbedWeb 2.0, a term coined in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci[103] and popularized in 2004 at theWeb 2.0 Conference. The Web 2.0 boom drew investment from companies worldwide and saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a newly "democratized" Web.[104][105][106][107][108][109]
JavaScript made the development of interactiveweb applications possible. Web pages could run JavaScript and respond to user input, but they could not interact with the network. Browsers could submit data to servers via forms and receive new pages, but this was slow compared to traditional desktop applications. Developers that wanted to offer sophisticated applications over the Web used Java or nonstandard solutions such asAdobe Flash or Microsoft'sActiveX.
Microsoft added a little-noticed feature calledXMLHttpRequest to Internet Explorer in 1999, which enabled a web page to communicate with the server while remaining visible. Developers atOddpost used this feature in 2002 to create the firstAjax application, awebmail client that performed as well as a desktop application.[110] Ajax apps were revolutionary. Web pages evolved beyond static documents to full-blown applications. Websites began offeringAPIs in addition to webpages. Developers created a plethora of Ajax apps includingwidgets,mashups and new types ofsocial apps. Analysts called itWeb 2.0.[111]
Browser vendors improved the performance of their JavaScript engines[112] and dropped support for Flash and Java.[113][114] Traditionalclient server applications were replaced bycloud apps. Amazon reinvented itself as acloud service provider.
The use ofsocial media on the Web has become ubiquitous in everyday life.[115][116] The 2010s also saw the rise of streaming services, such asNetflix.
In spite of the success of Web 2.0 applications, theW3C forged ahead with their plan to replace HTML withXHTML and represent all data inXML. In 2004, representatives from Mozilla,Opera, and Apple formed an opposing group, theWeb Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), dedicated to improving HTML while maintaining backward compatibility.[117] For the next several years, websites did not transition their content to XHTML; browser vendors did not adopt XHTML2; and developers eschewed XML in favor ofJSON.[118] By 2007, the W3C conceded and announced they were restarting work on HTML[119] and in 2009, they officially abandoned XHTML.[120] In 2019, the W3C ceded control of the HTML specification, now called the HTML Living Standard, to WHATWG.[121]
Microsoft rewrote theirEdge browser in 2021 to use Chromium as its code base in order to be more compatible with Chrome.[122]
The increasing use of encrypted connections (HTTPS) enablede-commerce andonline banking. Nonetheless, the 2010s saw the emergence of various controversial trends, such asinternet censorship and the growth ofcybercrime, including web-basedcyberattacks andransomware.[123][124]
Early attempts to allow wireless devices to access the Web used simplified formats such asi-mode andWAP.Apple introduced the firstsmartphone in 2007 with a full-featured browser. Other companies followed suit and in 2011, smartphone sales overtook PCs.[125] Since 2016, most visitors access websites with mobile devices[126] which led to the adoption ofresponsive web design.
Apple, Mozilla, and Google have taken different approaches to integrating smartphones with modern web apps. Apple initially promoted web apps for the iPhone, but then encouraged developers to makenative apps.[127] Mozilla announced Web APIs in 2011 to allow webapps to access hardware features such as audio, camera or GPS.[128] Frameworks such asCordova andIonic allow developers to buildhybrid apps. Mozilla released amobile OS designed to run web apps in 2012,[129] but discontinued it in 2015.[130]
Google announced specifications forAccelerated Mobile Pages (AMP),[131] andprogressive web applications (PWA) in 2015.[132] AMPs use a combination of HTML, JavaScript, andWeb Components to optimize web pages for mobile devices; and PWAs are web pages that, with a combination ofweb workers andmanifest files, can be saved to a mobile device and opened like a native app.
The extension of the Web to facilitate data exchange was explored as an approach to create aSemantic Web (sometimes called Web 3.0). This involved using machine-readable information and interoperability standards to enable context-understanding programs to intelligently select information for users.[133] Continued extension of the Web has focused on connecting devices to the Internet, coinedIntelligent Device Management. As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, manufacturers have started to leverage the expanded computing power of their devices to enhance their usability and capability. Through Internet connectivity, manufacturers are now able to interact with the devices they have sold and shipped to their customers, and customers are able to interact with the manufacturer (and other providers) to access a lot of new content.[134]
This phenomenon has led to the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT),[135] where modern devices are connected through sensors, software, and other technologies that exchange information with other devices and systems on the Internet. This creates an environment where data can be collected and analyzed instantly, providing better insights and improving the decision-making process. Additionally, the integration of AI with IoT devices continues to improve their capabilities, allowing them to predict customer needs and perform tasks, increasing efficiency and user satisfaction.
Web3 (sometimes also referred to as Web 3.0) is an idea for adecentralized Web based on publicblockchains,smart contracts,digital tokens anddigital wallets.[136]
The next generation of the Web is often termed Web 4.0, but its definition is not clear. According to some sources, it is a Web that involvesartificial intelligence,[137] theinternet of things,pervasive computing,ubiquitous computing and theWeb of Things among other concepts.[138] According to the European Union, Web 4.0 is "the expected fourth generation of the World Wide Web. Using advanced artificial and ambient intelligence, the internet of things, trusted blockchain transactions, virtual worlds and XR capabilities, digital and real objects and environments are fully integrated and communicate with each other, enabling truly intuitive, immersive experiences, seamlessly blending the physical and digital worlds".[139]
Historiography of the Web poses specific challenges, including disposable data, missing links, lost content and archived websites, which have consequences for web historians. Sites such as theInternet Archive aim to preserve content.[140][141]
Unbeknownst to me at that early stage in my thinking, several people had hit upon similar concepts, which were never implemented.
When Berners-Lee developed his Enquire hypertext system during 1980, the ideas explored by Bush, Engelbart, and Nelson did not influence his work, as he was not aware of them. However, as Berners-Lee began to refine his ideas, the work of these predecessors would later confirm the legitimacy of his system.
Berners-Lee and others worked to ensure that CERN would make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation.
With recent phenomena like blogs and wikis, the Web is beginning to develop the kind of collaborative nature that its inventor envisaged from the start.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)