Who invented the world wide web. "World Wide Web" (WWW)

What is the World Wide Web?

The web, or “web,” is a collection of interconnected pages with specific information. Each such page can contain text, images, video, audio and other various objects. But besides this, there are so-called hyperlinks on web pages. Each such link points to another page, which is located on some other computer on the Internet.

Various information resources, which are interconnected by means of telecommunications and based on hypertext representation of data, form the World Wide Web (World Wide Web, or WWW for short).

Hyperlinks link pages that are located on various computers located in different parts globe. A huge number of computers that are united into one network is the Internet, and the “World Wide Web” is a huge number of web pages hosted on network computers.

Each web page on the Internet has an address - URL (Uniform Resource Locator - unique address, name). It is at this address that you can find any page.

How was the World Wide Web created?

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee presented the project to CERN management unified system organization, storage and general access to information, which was supposed to solve the problem of sharing knowledge and experience between the Center’s employees. The problem of access to information on different computers Berners-Lee proposed a solution for employees using browser programs that provide access to a server computer where hypertext information is stored. After successful implementation Berners-Lee project was able to convince the rest of the world to use common Internet communication standards using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) standards and universal language markup (HTML).

It should be noted that Tim Berners-Lee was not the first creator of the Internet. The first system of protocols providing data transfer between networked computers was developed by employees of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Vinton Cerf And Robert Kahn in the late 60s - early 70s of the last century. Berners-Lee only proposed using the capabilities of computer networks to create new system organizing information and accessing it.

What was the prototype of the World Wide Web?

Back in the 60s of the 20th century, the US Department of Defense set the task of developing a reliable information transmission system in case of war. The US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) proposed developing a computer network for this purpose. They called it ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). The project brought together four scientific institutions - the University of Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute and the Universities of Santa Barbara and Utah. All work was financed by the US Department of Defense.

The first data transmission over a computer network took place in 1969. A Los Angeles University professor and his students tried to log into Stanford's computer and pass the word "login." Only the first two letters L and O were successfully transmitted. When they typed the letter G, the communication system failed, but the Internet revolution took place.

By 1971, a network with 23 users was created in the United States. The first program was developed to send email over the network. And in 1973, University College London and the Civil Services in Norway joined the network, and the network became international. In 1977, the number of Internet users reached 100, in 1984 - 1000, in 1986 there were already more than 5000, in 1989 - more than 100,000. In 1991, a project was implemented at CERN World-Wide Web(WWW). In 1997, there were already 19.5 million Internet users.

Some sources indicate the date of the emergence of the World Wide Web a day later - March 13, 1989.

Initially, the Internet was a computer network for transmitting information, developed at the initiative of the US Department of Defense. The reason was given by the first one launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 artificial satellite Earth. The US military decided that in this case they needed an ultra-reliable communication system. ARPANET was not a secret for long and soon began to be actively used by various branches of science.

The first successful remote communication session was conducted in 1969 from Los Angeles to Stanford. In 1971, an instantly popular program for sending email over the Internet was developed. The first foreign organizations to connect to the network were in the UK and Norway. With the introduction of the transatlantic telephone cable to these countries, ARPANET became international network.

The ARPANET was perhaps a more advanced communication system, but it was not the only one. And only by 1983, when the American network was filled with the first news groups, bulletin boards and switched to using the TCP/IP protocol, which made it possible to integrate into other computer networks, ARPANET became the Internet. Literally a year later, this title began to gradually pass to NSFNet, an inter-university network that had a large throughput and gained 10 thousand connected computers during the annual period. The first Internet chat appeared in 1988, and in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of the World Wide Web.

World Wide Web

In 1990, ARPANET finally lost to NSFNet. It is worth noting that both of them were developed by the same scientific organizations, only the first was commissioned by the US defense services, and the second was on its own initiative. However, this competitive pairing led to scientific developments and discoveries that made the World Wide Web a reality, which became publicly available in 1991. Berners Lee, who proposed its concept, developed over the next two years HTTP protocol(hypertext), HTML language and URL IDs, which are more familiar ordinary users such as Internet addresses, sites and pages.

World Wide Web is a system that provides access to files on a server computer connected to the Internet. This is partly why today the concepts of the web and the Internet often replace each other. In fact, the Internet is a communication technology, a kind of information space, and the World Wide Web fills it. This spider network consists of many millions of web servers - computers and their systems that are responsible for the operation of websites and pages. To access web resources (download, view) from regular computer browser program is used. Web, WWW are synonyms for the World Wide Web. WWW users number in the billions.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a distributed system that provides access to interconnected documents located on various computers connected to the Internet. The word “web” (translated from English web means “web”) and the abbreviation WWW are also used to refer to the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is made up of hundreds of millions of web servers. Most of the resources on the World Wide Web are based on hypertext technology. Hypertext documents posted on the World Wide Web are called web pages. Several web pages that share a common theme, design, and links and are usually located on the same web server are called a website. To download and view web pages, special programs are used - browsers. The World Wide Web has caused a real revolution in information technology and the explosion in the development of the Internet. Often, when talking about the Internet, they mean the World Wide Web, but it is important to understand that they are not the same thing.

History of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee and, to a lesser extent, Robert Cayo are considered the inventors of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee is the originator of HTTP, URI/URL and HTML technologies. In 1980 he worked for the European Council for Nuclear Research as a software consultant. It was there, in Geneva (Switzerland), that he wrote the Enquire program for his own needs, which used random associations to store data and laid the conceptual basis for the World Wide Web. In 1989, while working at CERN on the organization's intranet, Tim Berners-Lee proposed the global hypertext project, now known as the World Wide Web.

The project involved the publication of hypertext documents linked by hyperlinks, which would facilitate the search and consolidation of information for CERN scientists. To implement the project, Tim Berners-Lee invented URIs, the HTTP protocol, and the HTML language. These are technologies without which it is no longer possible to imagine the modern Internet. Between 1991 and 1993, Berners-Lee refined the technical specifications of these standards and published them. But, nevertheless, the official year of birth of the World Wide Web should be considered 1989. As part of the project, Berners-Lee wrote the world's first web server, httpd, and the world's first hypertext web browser, called WorldWideWeb. This browser was also a WYSIWYG editor; its development began in October 1990 and was completed in December of the same year.

Structure and principles of the World Wide Web

World Wide Web around Wikipedia

The World Wide Web is made up of millions of Internet web servers located around the world. A web server is a program that runs on a computer connected to a network and uses the HTTP protocol to transfer data. In its simplest form, such a program receives an HTTP request for a specific resource over the network, finds the corresponding file on the local hard drive and sends it over the network to the requesting computer. More complex web servers are capable of dynamically allocating resources in response to an HTTP request. To identify resources (often files or parts thereof) on the World Wide Web, uniform resource identifiers (URIs) are used. Uniform Resource Identifier). Uniform URL resource locators are used to locate resources on the web. Uniform Resource Locator). These URL locators combine URI identification technology and the DNS domain name system. Domain Name System) - a domain name (or directly an address in a numeric notation) is part of a URL to designate a computer (more precisely, one of its network interfaces), which executes the code of the desired web server.

To view information received from the web server on the client computer, use special program- web browser. The main function of a web browser is to display hypertext. The World Wide Web is inextricably linked with the concepts of hypertext and hyperlinks. Most of the information on the Internet is hypertext. To facilitate the creation, storage and display of hypertext on the World Wide Web, HTML is traditionally used. HyperText Markup Language), hypertext markup language. The work of marking up hypertext is called layout; the markup master is called a webmaster or webmaster (without a hyphen). After HTML markup, the resulting hypertext is placed in a file; such an HTML file is the main resource of the World Wide Web. Once an HTML file is made available to a web server, it is called a “web page.” A collection of web pages makes up a website. Hyperlinks are added to the hypertext of web pages. Hyperlinks help World Wide Web users easily navigate between resources (files), regardless of whether the resources are located on local computer or on a remote server. Web hyperlinks are based on URL technology.

World Wide Web Technologies

To improve the visual perception of the web, CSS technology has become widely used, which allows you to specify uniform styles design for many web pages. Another innovation worth paying attention to is the URN resource designation system. Uniform Resource Name).

A popular concept for the development of the World Wide Web is the creation of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web is an add-on to the existing World Wide Web, which is designed to make information posted on the network more understandable to computers. The Semantic Web is a concept of a network in which every resource in human language would be provided with a description that a computer can understand. The Semantic Web provides access to clearly structured information for any application, regardless of platform and regardless of programming languages. Programs will be able to find themselves necessary resources, process information, classify data, identify logical connections, draw conclusions and even make decisions based on these conclusions. If widely adopted and implemented wisely, the Semantic Web has the potential to spark a revolution on the Internet. To create computer understandable resource descriptions, the Semantic Web uses the RDF (English) format. Resource Description Framework ), which is based on XML syntax and uses URIs to identify resources. New in this area is RDFS (English) Russian (English) RDF Schema) and SPARQL (eng. Protocol And RDF Query Language ) (pronounced "sparkle") new language requests for quick access to RDF data.

History of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee and, to a lesser extent, Robert Cayo are considered the inventors of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee is the originator of HTTP, URI/URL and HTML technologies. In 1980 he worked at the European Council for Nuclear Research (French). Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, CERN ) software consultant. It was there, in Geneva (Switzerland), that he wrote the Enquire program for his own needs. Enquire, can be loosely translated as "Interrogator"), which used random associations to store data and laid the conceptual foundation for the World Wide Web.

The world's first website was hosted by Berners-Lee on August 6, 1991 on the first web server available at http://info.cern.ch/, (). Resource defined the concept World Wide Web, contained instructions for setting up a web server, using a browser, etc. This site was also the world's first Internet directory because Tim Berners-Lee later posted and maintained a list of links to other sites there.

The first photograph on the World Wide Web was of the parody filk band Les Horribles Cernettes. Tim Bernes-Lee asked the group leader for scans of them after the CERN Hardronic Festival.

And yet theoretical foundations The web was founded much earlier than Berners-Lee. Back in 1945, Vannaver Busch developed the concept of Memex. (English) Russian - auxiliary mechanical means of “expanding human memory”. Memex is a device in which a person stores all his books and records (and, ideally, all his knowledge that can be formally described) and which issues necessary information with sufficient speed and flexibility. It is an extension and addition to human memory. Bush also predicted comprehensive indexing of text and multimedia resources with the ability quick search necessary information. The next significant step towards the World Wide Web was the creation of hypertext (a term coined by Ted Nelson in 1965).

• The Semantic Web involves improving the coherence and relevance of information on the World Wide Web through the introduction of new metadata formats.
• The Social Web relies on the work of organizing the information available on the Web, carried out by the Web users themselves. In the second direction, developments that are part of the semantic web are actively used as tools (RSS and other web channel formats, OPML, XHTML microformats). Partially semantic sections of the Wikipedia Category Tree help users consciously navigate information space However, very lenient requirements for subcategories do not give reason to hope for the expansion of such areas. In this regard, attempts to compile knowledge atlases may be of interest.

There is also a popular concept Web 2.0, which summarizes several directions of development of the World Wide Web.

Methods for actively displaying information on the World Wide Web

Information on the web can be displayed either passively (that is, the user can only read it) or actively - then the user can add information and edit it. Methods for actively displaying information on the World Wide Web include:

It should be noted that this division is very arbitrary. So, say, a blog or guest book can be considered as special case forum, which, in turn, is a special case of a content management system. Usually the difference is manifested in the purpose, approach and positioning of a particular product.

Some information from websites can also be accessed through speech. India has already begun testing a system that makes the text content of pages accessible even to people who cannot read and write.

The World Wide Web is sometimes ironically called the Wild Wild Web, in reference to the title of the film Wild Wild West.

See also

Notes

Literature

• Fielding, R.; Gettys, J.; Mogul, J.; Fristik, G.; Mazinter, L.; Leach, P.; Berners-Lee, T. (June 1999). “Hypertext Transfer Protocol - http://1.1” (Information Sciences Institute).
• Berners-Lee, Tim; Bray, Tim; Connolly, Dan; Cotton, Paul; Fielding, Roy; Jeckle, Mario; Lilly, Chris; Mendelsohn, Noah; Orcard, David; Walsh, Norman; Williams, Stuart (December 15, 2004). "Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One" (W3C).
• Polo, Luciano World Wide Web Technology Architecture: A Conceptual Analysis. New Devices(2003). Archived from the original on August 24, 2011. Retrieved July 31, 2005.

Links

• Official website of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (English)
• Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. - New York: HarperCollins Publishers (English) Russian . - 256 p. - ISBN 0-06-251587-X, ISBN 978-0-06-251587-2(English)

The Internet today has firmly entered our lives. But few people know the name Tim Berners Lee. Meanwhile, this is exactly the person who created the Internet - the World Wide Web, without which many cannot even imagine their lives.

Timothy's biography is quite simple: he was born in 1955, in the month of June, on the 8th. His homeland is London. Tim's parents were computer mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee (father) and Mary Lee Woods (mother). Both parents worked at the same university (Manchester) to create an electronic computer, with RAM - “Manchester Mark I”.

It goes without saying that little Tim, seeing the adults doing things, played, constructing small computer models from empty boxes. Yes, and Tim drew mainly on computer punched cards - sort of cardboard with holes, the first storage media.

Years of study

Tim Berners studied at the prestigious Emanuel School, where his passion for design and mathematics, his success in studying, surprised everyone. His biography has the following entry: “Years of study at school - 1969-1973”

However, after graduating from school in 1973, upon entering King's College at the University of Oxford, Tim Berners decided to become a physicist.

And here Tim Berners-Lee’s childhood craving for computers awoke again - in the biography of the future Internet pioneer he appears interesting fact. Taking a Motorola M6800 processor and a regular TV, Tim managed to solder them into his first computer.

Like the biography of any mischievous boy, the biography of Timothy John Berners-Lee has fascinating pages that reveal the personality from a not entirely attractive side. Actually, it was reckless to condemn the young man for hacking the university computer database - this was just a fact of curiosity and testing his strength. But as a result, Tim received a stern warning from the rector and a ban on using a computer at the university.

Job

In 1976, Timothy Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford University with honors and received a bachelor's degree in physics. Having moved to Dorset, the future creator of the Internet gets a job at the Plessey corporation. Here Tim Berners is programming systems for information transmission, transaction distribution and creating barcode technology.

In 1978, Timothy John Berners-Lee changed jobs. At D.G Nash Ltd, his responsibilities are also changing: Tim Berners now creates programs for printers and multitasking systems.

Tim Berners-Lee was invited to Switzerland in 1980, where the future creator of the Internet works as a software consultant at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It is in Switzerland that Tim Berners, after work, begins to work on the Enquire program - the basis of the World Wide Web.

In 1981, Tim Berners-Lee joined Image Computer Systems Ltd, where he successfully worked on graphics and communications software and real-time systems architecture. Later, in 1984, the future creator of the Internet began to develop a real-time system that was designed to collect scientific information. At the same time, Tim Berners-Lee develops applications computer technology, accelerating particles, as well as other scientific equipment.

When asked what year the World Wide Web was created, the answer can be 1989. It was then that Tim Berners-Lee proposed to his management the idea of ​​the World Wide Web, which was based on the Enquire concept. This was the beginning of the invention of the Internet. He came up with the name “World Wide Web” himself, based on linking a variety of hypertext web pages using hyperlinks and a data transfer protocol. Previously, these protocols were used in the US military ARPANET network. This, as well as the university network protocol NSFNET, became the predecessors of the World Wide Web, thanks to which the Internet appeared.

And now the speech of the one who created the Internet in the video (in English, but with subtitles):

Birth of the World Wide Web

In the wonderful year of 1989, the protocol received new area activities: they began to use it for exchanging mail and communicating in real time, for commercial purposes and reading news groups. The idea, which was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, was accepted by director Mike Sandell. But Tim Berners did not receive large funds for his work, only an offer to conduct experiments on one of personal computers from NeXT.

Despite the difficulties, Tim Berners successfully copes with the task set for himself: he develops the first ever web server and the first web browser. The WorldWideWeb page editor, a standardized way of writing website addresses on the Internet, the HTML language and protocol owe their appearance to his talent as a developer. application level data transfer.

The following year, Tim Berners-Lee received an assistant - Belgian Robert Caillot. Thanks to him, the Internet project received funding. Robert also took upon himself all organizational issues. Despite his active participation in the development and promotion of the project, the main creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, whose name is revered by all programmers in the world, went down in history. Robert Caillot did not reserve the right to charge fees for the use of the invention and was undeservedly forgotten.

Later, in 1993, Tim Berners-Lee created several browsers for different operating systems, which increased the share of the World Wide Web (WWW) in total Internet traffic.

An interesting fact is that the Gopher protocol was previously developed by the University of Minnesota, which could well become an alternative modern Internet. But Tim Berners-Lee disputes this fact, putting forward the opinion that that protocol would not have withstood competition with the World Wide Web (WWW) due to the fact that the creators of this project demanded a fee for its implementation.