Introduction to the world wide web

Evolution and History

The origins of the Web can be tracked to research projects sponsored by the US Government in the 1960s and 70s to build a network infrastructure capable of withstanding any number of possible disasters. The result was a loosely coupled network of computers called the Internet.

The Internet was unique in that it did not have one centralized host nor did it rely on predefined connection paths to move information. The genius of the internet was that packets of information” found their own way” through the network from source to destination. The result was a network that would continue to function despite the failure of one or more nodes.

Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, the internet was used primarily by large corporations and universities for e-mail and document transfer. However, it wasn’t until the development of web browsers and a language called HTML that things really took off. HTML was developed by Tim Berners-Lee while he worked as a researcher in Switzerland. The original internet of HTML was to provide a quick and easy way to facilitate information transfer among scientists. The basic idea behind HTML is the insertion of tags within plain ASCII text and the interpretation of those tags by a software program called a browser.

The first graphical browser, mosaic, became an instant success. Users were able to view text and graphics located on other computers by clicking on especially highlighted words or links. The low overhead and simplicity of HTML led to its quick acceptance by internet network infrastructure- the World Wide Web.

World Wide Web evolution

In the beginning, the World Wide Web was introduced as a medium for sharing scientific and research documents, especially, between government organizations and academic institutions. But with the passage of time, it evolved and crossed the limits defined for it. Initially, till 1990, the WWW remain within the boundaries of CERN (a research organization), but by 1991, it became available to anyone using the internet.

Evolution of web from 1.0( the world wide web) to web 2.0 ( the social web) and then to web 3.0 (the semantic web).

Web 1.0 – The world Wide Web (1990-2000)

• Remain limited mostly to a static website.

• Mostly publishing / Brochure-ware. Limited to reading only for the majority.

• Proprietary and closed access.

• Corporations mostly, no communities.

• HTTP, HTML

Web 2.0 – The Social Web (2000-2010)

• Publishing as well as Participation

• Social Media, Blogging Wikis

• RSS – Syndicate site contents.

• Rich user Experience

• Tagging

• Keyword search

• AJAX, JavaScript Frameworks, XML, JSON

Web 3.0 – The Semantic Web (2010-onwards)

• Mostly drag and drop

• Highly mobile-oriented

• Microblogging

• Cloud and Grid computing

• Open ID

• Semantic search

• Semantic Techniques like RDF, SWRL, OWL, etc.