World Wide Web Tutorial: A Brief History of its Development

Overview

The current development of the internet was down to a project based in CERN, a Swiss research centre. The project?s main purpose to enable physicists to send research papers and experiment results to each other.

This article briefly describes the three technologies, HTML, HTTP and browser software, which were developed by the project and why they are so important today.

Where it all started

CERN, (Centre Europ?en de Recherche Nucl?aire), or European Organization for Nuclear Research is one of the world?s leading scientific research centre.? Currently it is most famous as the home of the? Large Hadron Collider, which is investigating how the universe was created after the Big Bang.

The centre has always been of great interest to physicists throughout the world.? In the pre-Internet world research papers and experimental results would have to be either printed or using fairly primitive electronic communication.

And then the World Wide Web was born

A number of people were looking at ways of improving the communication between the researchers.? The amount of research data was huge and was too unwieldy to be printed.

Techniques, such as gopher, ( a way of copying information on one computer and transferring it to another), were often difficult, as the the two computer systems could work in different ways, (called protocols), and it often required quite a lot of technical knowledge to perform a simple conversion to enable those at the receiving end to be able to use the data.

In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, was working on a solution.? He worked on three technologies to allow the documents to be distributed and read:

Why are these three technologies important?

In that period the first small desk top computers emerged.? By today?s standards they were very primitive, with memories measured in thousands of bytes, very slow and their connections to other computers were by dial-up phone modems.? Consequently they were very limited and would not be able to do the complicated mathematics, on numerous rows of results,? most physicists required.

At that time academic researchers would be using large, university based machines, which generally had very limited software, that was only available for their specific computer and in many cases each research team developed their own software packages, to process their own results, which was often difficult for others to use.

With the combination of HTML, HTTP and a browser a researcher in one country could access and download pages from a remote computer, that could be in a different country, using a completely different system.? This is why this project was so successful ? it met an important need ? that of rapidly speeding up communication

What is HTML?

An HTML document is simply a text file with a few special codes, (call tags), in it to control the layout.

The advantage of a text file is that all computers can read a text file and so many HTML document can be sent from one machine to another without too much trouble.

The tags are fairly simple.? As an example

<p>This is a simple paragraph with the word <b>bold</b>in bold.</p>

The <p> tag starts a paragraph.? The </p> tag switches the paragraph off.

The <b> tag switches bold on.? The </b> tag switches bold off.

The paragraph will look like this:? This is a simple paragraph with the word bold in bold.

Most tags are a pair, switch on, and are then switched off, with the same tag, but with a forward slash in front of the command.? eg <i>Italics</i>

Tags control layout, the placing of images, links, header text and tables. However, some tags have been? superceded by an upgrade to web technologies CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, which give the developer much more control over fonts, text size, spacing and much more.

For developing your HTML coding try the W3school website.

What is HTTP, ( Hypertext transfer protocol)?

This is the system that finds a page on the web and then brings it to your computer.? It warns the computer to expect an HTML page.? (Nowadays the page could also be an XHTML page, (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language), which though very similar to HTML is a more formal document markup structure and is the now recommended standard for web page developers).

Whenever you type in a web address, known as the URL, (Uniform Resource Locator)? ? it is the HTTP system that translates the name into a four part number, called an IP, (Internet Protocol) number, which will look something like this -? 86.164.206.217, (which is the UK based BT broadband supplier).? Look up your IP address on What is my IP address?

HTTP, (Hypertext transfer protocol).? Example.

In fact there are two parts to a web address.

So My web address???? http://blogbasics.com

The first part is the code http:// which tells your computer system that you are looking for a web page in either HTML or XHTML format.

The blogbasics.com is converted into the IP number format 50.22.67.61

The system will then find the server, (the computer where the page is located), and transfer a copy to your computer.? This is then processed by your browser into a formatted web page.

Browsers

Browsers are the software programs that convert an HTML or XHTML document into the web page that is read by the user.? A copy of a page is downloaded through HTTP into the user?s computer.? The browser then converts the code and text into a readable web page.

The program analyses the HTML file and identifies the HTML tags, which then controls how the browser displays the page.? The layout is formatted including using the right character set, positioning necessary images or video and adding such features as background colour.

Today the advanced browsers and servers allow many other actions to take place, such as access to a database, automatically adding a date, remember the layout the individual user previously wanted or to show advertisements relevant to the user?s location.

Advantages of Browsers?

A browser can be developed for any type of computer be they laptop, desktop or large mainframe and for any operating system.? You will see roughly the same page ? be it on an Apple, Windows or Unix system.

A browser can also be written for new devices, such as smart phones, which are then surf the net, even though many of the web pages were written well before these advanced technologies were no more than an idea in science fiction.

Browser Wars

In the PC world there has a lot of conflict between Microsoft, with their Internet Explorer, and other browser developers, such as Firefox and Google?s Chrome.

The Microsoft product often has a different way of rendering, (laying out), web pages than the other browser developers.?? This has caused a lot of aggravation for web site developers as many have had to add extra coding to make sure that the layout is the same in all the browsers.

Conclusion

The Tim Berners-Lee?s identification and development of three technologies ? the standardised making up of an electronic? document, the development of a method to send the document from one computer to another, (with the ability to be able to type in a domain name, rather than remembering set of digits), and the development of browsing software really kicked started the whole internet revolution.

To be truthful the revolution would have taken place within a few years as the problems of electronic communication and access information on remote computers was being looked by many others.

The big legacy is that coming out of a research centre, rather than a business, has meant that individuals, businesses and governments have been able to build on his work without the threat of legal battles or patent protection.? The internet would have developed a lot slower and probably would have cost a lot more to use.

Over to you

What do you think?

Source: http://blogbasics.com/2196/history-of-web/world-wide-web-tutorial-a-brief-history-of-its-development

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