{"id":257,"date":"2015-07-23T21:10:07","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T21:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.candelalearning.com\/computerapps\/?post_type=chapter&p=257"},"modified":"2016-04-25T19:19:33","modified_gmt":"2016-04-25T19:19:33","slug":"reading-the-world-wide-web","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/sanjacinto-computerapps\/chapter\/reading-the-world-wide-web\/","title":{"raw":"Reading: The World Wide Web","rendered":"Reading: The World Wide Web"},"content":{"raw":"

Introduction<\/h2>\r\n\"graphicThe World Wide Web<\/b> (www<\/b>, W3<\/b>) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URIs,\u00a0interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet.\u00a0<\/span>It has become known simply as the Web<\/i>. Hypertext documents are commonly called web pages<\/i>, which are primarily\u00a0text documents formatted and annotated with the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Webpages may contain links to images, video, and software components that are rendered to users of a web browser application, running on the user's computer, as coherent pages of multimedia content. Embedded\u00a0hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. When multiple web pages are published with a common theme or within a common domain name, the collection is usually called a web site<\/i>.\r\n\r\nBritish computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web.\u00a0<\/span>As a CERN employee, Berners-Lee distributed a proposal on 12 March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.\u00a0The initial proposal intended a more effective CERN communication system, but Berners-Lee also realized the concept could be implemented throughout the world.\u00a0<\/span>Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext \"to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will\",\u00a0<\/span>and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December of that year.\u00a0<\/span>The first test was completed around 20 December 1990 and Berners-Lee reported about the project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext<\/i> on 7 August 1991.\r\n

History<\/span><\/h2>\r\n
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\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"250\"]\"Photo The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nOn March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee issued a proposal to the management at CERN that referenced ENQUIRE<\/a>, a database and software project he had built in 1980, and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded in readable text: \"Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network 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 word hypertext<\/i>, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners-Lee goes on to propose the term hypermedia<\/i>.\r\n\r\nWith help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a \"Hypertext project\" called \"WorldWideWeb\" (one word, also \"W3\") as a \"web\" of \"hypertext documents\" to be viewed by \"browsers\" using a client\u2013server architecture.\u00a0<\/span>This 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.\" While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS\/Atom.\r\n\r\nThe proposal was modeled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within\u00a0HyTime, but it 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.\r\n
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\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"220\"]\"Photo The CERN data center in 2010 housing some WWW servers[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nA NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser,WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,\u00a0which described the project itself.\r\n\r\nThe first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina announced in May 2013 that Berners-Lee gave him what he says is the oldest known web page during a 1991 visit to UNC. Jones stored it on amagneto-optical drive and on his NeXT computer.\r\n\r\nOn 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup\u00a0alt.hypertext<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span>This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet, although new users only accessed it after 23 August. For this reason this is considered the internaut's day. Several news media have reported that the first photo on the Web was published by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story, writing that media were \"totally distorting our words for the sake of cheap sensationalism.\"\r\n\r\nThe first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, to host the SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992,\u00a0<\/span>whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.\u00a0<\/span>This is supported by a W3C document titled A Little History of the World Wide Web<\/i>.\r\n\r\nThe underlying concept of hypertext originated in previous projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based memex<\/i>, which was described in the 1945 essay \"As We May Think\".\r\n\r\nBerners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web<\/i>, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both<\/i> technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:\r\n