Video Games Forum - Free Online Arcade and Gaming Forum - View Single Post - Editorial: What (Exactly) Is The World Wide Web?

The Big Nerd · #2 (**permalink**) 12-23-2002, 07:31 PM

History

The World Wide Web was developed by British physicist and computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee as a project within the European Center for Nuclear Energy Research (CERN, now the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee first began working with hypertext in the early 1980s. His idea of the Web became operational at CERN in 1989, and it quickly spread to universities in the rest of the world through the high-energy physics community of scholars. Groups at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana also researched and developed Web technology. They developed the first major browser, named Mosaic, in 1993. Mosaic was the first browser to come in several different versions, each of which was designed to run on a different operating system. Operating systems are the basic software that control computers.

The architecture of the Web is straightforward. For the user, the Web is attractive to use because it is built upon a graphical user interface (GUI), a method of displaying information and controls with pictures. The Web also works on diverse types of computing equipment because it is made up of a small set of programs. This small set makes it relatively simple for programmers to write software that can translate information on the Web into a form that corresponds to a particular operating system. The Web's methods of storing information associatively, retrieving documents with hypertext links, and naming Web sites with URLs make it a smooth extension of the rest of the Internet. This allows easy access to information between different parts of the Internet.

What the Future Holds

People continue to extend and improve on World Wide Web technology. Computer scientists predict that users will likely see at least five new ways in which the Web has been extended: new ways of searching the Web, new ways of restricting access to intellectual property, more integration of entire databases into the Web, more access to software libraries, and more and more electronic commerce.

HTML will probably continue to go through new forms with extended capabilities for formatting Web pages. Other complementary programming and coding systems such as Visual Basic scripting, Virtual Reality Markup Language (VMRL), Active X programming, and Java scripting will probably continue to gain larger roles in the Web. This will result in more powerful Web pages, capable of bringing information to users in more engaging and exiting ways.

On the hardware side, faster connections to the Web will allow users to download more information, making it practical to include more information and more complicated multimedia elements on each Web page. Software, telephone, and cable companies are planning partnerships that will allow information from the Web to travel into homes along improved telephone lines and coaxial cable such as that used for cable television. New kinds of computers, specifically designed for use with the Web, may become increasingly popular. These computers are less expensive than ordinary computers because they have fewer features, retaining only those required by the Web. Some computers even use ordinary television sets, instead of special computer monitors, to display content from the Web.

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Thanks, I passed the report in on Friday, as my teacher needs all vacation in order to correct the papers. So I hope I did well!