What it is and why you should care
Definition
The World Wide Web [the Web] is a collection of programs and computer systems that let people publish words, pictures, sounds, video, and computer data to be used by other people. The Web is the closest thing there is to a uniform view of the Internet.
Centralized Computing
When computers were first invented, they were large, bulky machines, often filling a room and sometimes even an entire building. They were also terribly expensive. When there were only a few computers in the world, there was no need to link them together. If you wanted to work on a particular computer, you went to where that computer was.
Beginnings of Networking
As computer science and computer engineering progressed, computers became faster, smaller, and cheaper... and as a result, much more prevalent. It soon became apparent that it was inconvenient to have to go to where a particular computer was in order to use it. Also, one might want to use computers at different sites at essentially the same time. Various technologies for connecting computers together were developed in order to solve this problem. During the 1960s the Department of Defense sponsored the development of the ARPANet, which connected together many different computers in a uniform way [Walrand 1991].
Development of the Internet
The ARPANet was so successful that in 1987 a similar network called the NSFNet was created by the National Science Foundation [Amdahl 1994] . The NSFNet combined with regional networks all around the world formed what is called the Internet [Amdahl 1994] .
The Internet, which connects together thousands of different computers and lets their users send mail, log in directly to a remote computer, transfer computer files, and do other useful tasks. The problem with the Internet as it stood was that each of these tasks required that the user learn a completely different way of interacting with each program. This situation can be very frustrating.
Development of the World Wide Web
Then onto the stage comes the Web. The first project proposal for the Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee, was circulated at CERN in March 1989; the first prototype was developed in November 1990; the first browser [line mode only] was released to a limited audience in March 1991 [W3 Consortium 1995] . It was not until the development of graphical browsers such as Mosaic, however, that the Web really took off. In January of 1993, there were about 50 known Web servers; Mosaic was introduced as an alpha version in February 1993 and as a working version in September 1993, and by October 1993 there were over 500 known Web servers [W3 Consortium 1995] . The Web continued to grow at near-exponential rates. By January 1995, there were over 12,000 known Web servers and the growth does not show any signs of slowing [Gray 1995].
The Internet viewed through the World Wide Web
To the Web, everything on the Internet is a resource and you can get to anything if you know its Uniform Resource Locator [URL]. Not only that, but Web browsers provide a consistent way of accessing and using resources. This obviates the need to learn different command systems when you want to use different features of the Internet.
Is the World Wide Web really the information superhighway?
Yes and no. The World Wide Web provides uniform access to distributed heterogenous data [lots of stuff and easy to get to]. However, as of 1995, it is not yet really adept at handling video and voice data. If you have the hardware you can get this sort of information, but there is still a good deal of work to do on this.
There is also the question of access. About 10-15% of the American population is embracing technology; the rest range from ambivalent to fearful [CBS 1995]. Those embracing technology are not a representative sample of the American population. In particular, the demographics of the Web do not match the demographics of the United States as a whole. For example, over 90% of Web users are male, and over 35% of Web users are graduate or undergraduate students [Pitkow and Recker 1994] . Another disperity is in economic and social status; there are some public access systems, but the fact that a great deal of computer equipment is needed to access the Web builds in a tremendous bias against the poor and disadvantaged. There is indeed a new division emerging between the "knows" and the "know-nots" [CBS 1995] but it is much easier for the "haves" to become "knows" than for the "have-nots" to become "knows". In the end this may change, but for right now, the Web is more like a "members only" club than a public access highway.
World Wide Web [WWW or W3], collection of globally distributed text and multimedia documents and files and other network services linked in such a way as to create an immense electronic library from which information can be retrieved quickly by intuitive searches. The Web represents the application of
hypertext technology and a graphical interface to the Internet to retrieve information that is contained in specially formatted documents that may reside in the same computer or be distributed across many computers around the world. It consists of three main elements. The
Hypertext Markup Language [HTML] comprises the programming codes, or tags, that define fonts, layouts, embedded graphics, and links [hyperlinks] to other documents accessible via the Web. The HyperText Transfer Protocol [HTTP] defines a set of standards for transmitting Web pages across the Internet. The Uniform Resource Locator [URL] is a standardized naming convention for identifying a Web document, image, or other file by its location, in a sense the address of a file. The result is called
the Web because it is made up of many sites, all linked together, with users traveling from one site to the next by clicking a computer's pointing device on a hyperlink.
Web sites, also called Web pages, are really Internet sites that all use the same techniques and HTML tags to create multimedia documents with hypertext links. Each Web page can contain many screens or printed pages of text, graphics, audio, and even video, and the starting point for any Web site is called its home page. Although each page is an Internet site, it must be accessed via a special program called a Web browser, which can translate the HTML into the graphical images, text, and hypertext links intended by the creator of the page.
Interactive television is a generic term that encompasses a variety of Web-related television technologies and products. Typically, a home television receiver and a telephone line are connected through a small appliance that accesses the Internet through the telephone line and converts the downloaded Web pages into a form that can be displayed on the receiver. A remote control interface allows the user to navigate through the Web and select the information to be displayed.
Ted Nelson, an American computer consultant, had promoted the idea of linking documents via hypertext during the 1960s, but the technology required was not to be available for another 20 years. The foundation of what we now think of as the Web originated with work done on the retrieval of information from distributed systems by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN during the 1980s. This culminated in the introduction of a text-only interface, or browser, to the scientific community in 1990 and to the public in 1991. Because of the difficulty of using this version, acceptance outside the scientific and academic communities was slow. Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate student working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA], developed a graphical browser for the Web, introducing a UNIX version in 1993. Versions for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems followed in 1994, and acceptance of the World Wide Web blossomed quickly. In the late 1990s the development of improved browsers with greater multimedia functionality, security, and privacy, as well as more powerful search engines capable of indexing the ever greater information on the Web, led to the commercialization of the Internet [see e-commerce].
See P. Whitehead and R. Maran, Internet and World Wide Web: Simplified [2d ed. 1997]; E. Wilde, Wilde's WWW: Technical Foundations of the World Wide Web [1997]; A. Glossbrenner and E. Glossbrenner, Search Engines: For the World Wide Web [2d ed. 1998]; S. Western, The Complete Beginner's Guide to the World Wide Web [1998]; T. Berners-Lee and M. Fischetti, Weaving the Web [1999].
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2022, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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