On
March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that referenced
ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, and
described a more elaborate information management system.
With
help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal (on 12
November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called
"WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web"
of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers"
using a client–server architecture. This proposal estimated that a
read-only web would be developed within three months and that it
would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and
new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal"
as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new
material of interest to him/her has become available." While the
read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took
longer to mature, with the wiki concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0 and
RSS/Atom.
The
proposal was modeled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic
Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in
Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system,
licensed by CERN, was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO
8879:1986 to Hypermedia within HyTime, but it was considered too
expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the
general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document
and each document alteration.
A
NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server
and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By
Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a
working Web: the first web browser (which was a web editor as well);
the first web server; and the first web pages, which described the
project itself.
The
first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in
North Carolina announced in May 2013 that Berners-Lee gave him what
he says is the oldest known web page during a 1991 visit to UNC.
Jones stored it on a magneto-optical drive and on his NeXT computer.
On
6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World
Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext. This date also
marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the
Internet, although new users only access it after August 23. For this
reason this is considered the internaut's day. Several newsmedia have
reported that the first photo on the Web was published by Berners-Lee
in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes
taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story,
writing that media were "totally distorting our words for the
sake of cheap sensationalism."
The
first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, to host the
SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of
this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992, whereas
SLAC itself claims 1991. This is supported by a W3C document titled A
Little History of the World Wide Web.
The
underlying concept of hypertext originated in previous projects from
the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown
University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's
oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired
by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based memex, which was described in the
1945 essay "As We May Think".
Berners-Lee's
breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book
Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a
marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both
technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he
finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed
three essential technologies:
-
a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and
elsewhere, the universal document identifier (UDI), later known as
uniform resource locator (URL) and uniform resource identifier (URI);
-
the publishing language HyperText Markup Language (HTML);
-
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The
World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext
systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional
links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone
to link to another resource without action by the owner of that
resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of
implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier
systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of link rot.
Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was
non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients
independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.
On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be
free to anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the
announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol
was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from
Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW
for Unix and the X Windowing System.
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