WEB DESIGN LECTURE NOTES  back to
WEEK 1: INTRODUCTION TO THE WEB  


origins of the web
march, 1989, tim berners-lee writes a short proposal for a networked information project he'd like to embark on at cern in switzerland (cern is the european laboratory for particle physics). he also writes a related paper on hypertext. well worth reading a decade later, his skeletal outline explains the key concepts upon which the web is built: content (ideally universally readable/translatable), links (hypertext), a client viewer (browser), and server app (httpd) that delivers the content.

some nuggets from the above papers:

"HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will."

"The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup."

"A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser. When starting a hypertext browser on your workstation, you will first be presented with a hypertext page which is personal to you : your personal notes, if you like. A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link."

"The texts are linked together in a way that one can go from one concept to another to find the information one wants. The network of links is called a web."

"The texts are known as nodes. The process of proceeding from node to node is called navigation. Nodes do not need to be on the same machine: links may point across machine boundaries. Having a world wide web implies some solutions must be found for problems such as different access protocols and different node content formats."

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

may, 1991, the www environment is deployed on most machines at cern. several months later tim declares prophetically that "sgml syntax is not beautiful".

november, 1992, the w3c lists 26 www servers as being reliably online.

march, 1994, marc andreeson, the creator of an early web browser called mosaic, leaves ncsa to create "mosaic communications corp", which would become netscape.

october, 1994, w3c is formed, proclaiming its goal to "lead the web to its full potential". the w3c becomes the international organization responsible for maintaining the standards which govern the technical implementation of the web (eg. html, xml, css, dhtml, and http (which was originally written in part by berners-lee, but is now a joint effort by the w3c and the ietf)).

if you're interested in more of this stuff, go read weaving the web, tim's book on the history of the web, available sept. 1999.

how does it work?


some examples
the future