The World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of linked, hypertext documents which can be accessed via the Internet. The WWW was invented by Sir Tim Burners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1989.
The modern concept of hypertext had been developed during the 1960s as a document storage system. However, Burners-Lee was the first to combine hypertext and the Internet.
Development of the World Wide Web
In 1980, Tim Burners-Lee created an application called Enquire which was a prototype Hypertext system for use at CERN – the European particle physics laboratory. While this application was not intended for use via the Internet, it implemented many of the same ideas that would be used in the later WWW.
The first formal proposal for the WWW was written by Burners-Lee in 1989 in “Information Management: A Proposal” (Burners-Lee, 1989). This document outlined the concept of information management in a Hypertext based system. A second document by Burners-Lee and Cailliau (Burners-Lee, Cailliau, 1990) was approved by their manager for development and by late 1990, the core components had been created.
The result of this work was the first web browser – WorldWideWeb, the first web server – HTTPD, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Together these technologies form the basis of the WWW itself.
By early 1993, WWW traffic accounts for 0.1% of traffic on the Internet, the prohibition on commercial use of the Internet was lifted by NSFNET (Leiner et al., 1999) and CERN allows the use of WWW technologies with no fees payable. This final move helped to ensure the future success of the WWW.
In 2004, Tim Burners-Lee was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to technology (BBC, 2003).
The Browser Wars
In mid 1993, several months after the announcement that WWW technologies were freely available, came the release of the Mosaic web browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) by an undergraduate student, Marc Andreessen. Mosaic was the first graphical web-browser which implemented in-line images – before Mosaic images either were not displayed, or shown in a separate window.
Mosaic quickly became the leading web-browser and helped to draw many new users to the Internet. Mosaic dramatically increased the uptake of Internet services by providing, for the first time, an easy-to-use graphical interface to information.
Andreessen went on to develop the first commercial web browser, Netscape Navigator. This application went on to fuel the public uptake of Internet services and its parent company Netscape Communications became the first dot-com company.
Following the success of Netscape, Microsoft entered the browser market by licensing Mosaic technology and modifying it to create Internet Explorer in late 1995. Although it would not attain significant market share until 1996. With each subsequent release, Microsoft gained more of the market, and by 1999 had overtaken Netscape by attaining 90% market share. At it’s peak in 2004, Internet Explorer accounted for approximately 99% of the browser market.
The first major competitor to the dominance of Internet Explorer came in the form of Mozilla Firefox, released in 2004. Firefox quickly gained a reputation for being a fast, reliable and highly customisable browser and today has approximately 15% market share.
Social Impacts of the World Wide Web
Initially, the WWW was targeted at academic users, but quickly found new applications. By 1990, several major companies and organisations had web presences.
The web is also responsible for the boom in e-commerce – allowing users to find and purchase items and services via the Internet.
Today, a trend referred to as Web 2.0 is driving the creation of user-focussed websites. These websites allow users to submit content, interact with other users and customise the experience to suit their own needs. Some current examples of Web 2.0 sites include:
- Video sharing: YouTube, Vimeo
- Photo sharing: Flickr
- Social-networking: Facebook, MySpace