Shodor ComputationalScience Institute: Introduction to the WWW

Introduction to the World Wide Web

Alton Patrick
The Shodor Education Foundation
June 1998

A Brief History of the World Wide Web

The birth of WWW technology is usually traced to the creation of the program "Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything" by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. "ENQUIRE" allowed links to be made between arbitrary pieces of information.

In 1989, Berners-Lee's idea of of non-linear data storage, which started with "ENQUIRE," resurfaced in a proposal titled Information Management: A Proposal. The idea for the World Wide Web was introduced in this proposal as a way of keeping track of large projects at CERN and the massive amounts of information they generated. A year and a half later, the project proposal was revised and Berners-Lee coined the name "World Wide Web" for it.

The WWW was released for general use on CERN's central machines May 17, 1991, which seems as good a date as any for placing the "official" birthday of the Web. In August of 1991, the files were released publicly on the Internet, in the form of posts to several newsgroups. By November of 1992 there were all of 26 "reasonably reliable" WWW servers.

The first browsers, which Berners-Lee and his team wrote for CERN, were completely text-based. Mosaic, a graphical browser developed by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), was released in October of 1993. It is interesting to note that both of today's most popular browsers (Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer) trace their ancestry to Mosaic: In 1994, members of the original Mosaic team left NCSA to form the company that would become Netscape. When Microsoft decided to get into the browser business, they licensed Mosaic's code from NCSA.

There is a more thorough discussion of WWW history at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Philosophy of the World Wide Web

The Web was intended to be a flexible means of keeping track of large quantities of data, which might or might not fit into an ordered model, such as a hierarchy. The idea of a Universal Resource Locater (URL) is important to this goal. Each item on the Internet is assigned a URL, which is composed of three basic parts: a protocol, a server, and a document location. So, the in URL

http://www.shodor.org/scsi/index.html "http" would be the protocol, "www.shodor.org" the server, and "/scsi/index.html" the document location. The protocol is the method used to talk to the server. HTTP, or HyperText Transfer Protocol, is the protocol most commonly used by WWW servers. FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is another common protocol.

With every file on the Internet assigned a URL, it is simple to create a link from one file to any other file on the Internet. The WWW's flexibility is apparent in that new protocols can be implemented by writing a program to handle that protocol. No change to the organization of the WWW is necessary.

The World Wide Web Consortium

The World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, is a consortium of interested universities and companies that work to develop standards for the WWW and new technologies that are compatible with the idea of the Web as a flexible and dynamic architecture for distributing and viewing information. The W3C was founded by Tim Berners-Lee, the WWW creator, in October 1994. You can find out more about the Consortium and its activities at its website.

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