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The World Wide Web

  • The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by programmer Tim Berners-Lee.
  • His project started as a way to simplify collaboration among scientists at particle physics labs around the world.
    • He quickly recognized the global value of this new Internet application.
  • He wrote the first web server in 1990, then the first HTML browser/editor (which he named WorldWideWeb.)
    • He published his work online in the USENET newsgroup discussion forums, the main Internet collaboration app of the time.
  • He launched the first web site in August, 1991.
  • Berners-Lee created three new technologies to comprise the Web:
  • The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) based on the much more extensive markup language SGML, and its dialect HyTime.
    • HTML defines document structure and presentation.
  • Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).
    • These provide a concise, consistent way of uniquely identifying and retrieving a resource on the Internet.
  • The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a protocol language for retrieving and publishing content.
    • This allows browsers and web servers to communicate in a simple but flexible and extensible way.

The story

After writing a proposal in 1989 describing his idea, Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web server software in 1990 in his lab at CERN, the particle-physics facility in Switzerland (where Berners-Lee worked as a physicist). He also wrote an HTML browser/editor program, and he and colleagues refined and developed his concept and his code and put together the first few web pages by the end of that year. After further testing and development, in August 1991 he put the first web site online, and published his results in USENET newsgroup alt.hypertext. Interest in the World Wide Web was immediate and enthusiastic. Programmers started working on their own web servers and browsers. Programmers at the National Centers for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign developed a web server and released it as opensource software. Would-be webmasters downloaded, compiled, and installed it to create early web sites. Other NCSA programmers, led by Marc Andreeson, created a web browser named Mosaic. Andreeson left NCSA to found what would become Netscape Communications and sell commercial web servers and browsers based on the NCSA work. Netscape Navigator was very successful and was the predominant browser through the mid-1990s until Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) began to dominate. Netscape released their browser source code, and the Mozilla open-source project took over, developing the Mozilla browser which then became Firefox, the most popular open-source browser. IE ruled the browser market until Google's Chrome browser overtook it in 2012.

Development of NCSA's web server, the NCSA httpd ("HTTP daemon") spun down. Commercial web servers (Netscape Server, Microsoft Internet Information Server) became available, but open-source developers continued distributing software patches to the NCSA server which came to be known as Apache. Its development was rapid and because it was free many organizations chose it over commercial alternatives. The project spawned a number of other open-source projects under the name Apache Project, with the web server named Apache httpd. It remained the dominant web server from the mid 1990s through at least the end of 2016.

The World Wide Web Consortium

Tim Berners-Lee went on to co-found and lead the World Wide Web Consortium (known as W3C), the international organization that oversees web-related standards including HTML, CSS, XML, DOM, SOAP, WSDL, and many others. Current versions of standards can be found at http://www.w3.org/standards.

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