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The Web
While e-mail, mailing lists,
newsgroups, file transfer, telnet and others have been around since the
mid-1970s, the Web has totally transformed the way the Internet is being
used. Retrieving information from the Internet used to be a lengthy process
to determine the location of the file and its format, starting an
application to display the file, logging into the right server, opening and
reading the file, and logging out. The Web has collapsed all these steps
into a single click of the mouse. What in the early days of the Internet
took minutes or sometimes hours, now takes only seconds. However, one
should never forget that the apparent simplicity of web ‘browsing’
software (such as Netscape or Internet Explorer) conceals enormous
technical power.
How is this possible? The inventors of the Web took a hypertext concept,
which had been used for many years in publishing software applications, and
designed a HyperText Markup Language (HTML). This software marks text so
that it can display formatting and graphics, and make ‘hyperlinks’ to other documents, data files, or images. They
also developed a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) so that clients and
servers can exchange hypertext documents over the Internet. For this, they
devised a universal resource locator (URL) that specifies the exact
location of the HTML document on the Internet and the type of service
requested. They recognised that, if such documents were made available on
servers scattered across the Internet, they would create a ‘web’ of
interconnected information that would stretch around the globe. Hence the
name World Wide Web. Within the Web, the URL directs a client’s request to a specific web server. The most
common URL format for retrieving files is http://name-server. Using web
servers, any Internet user with a web browser can gain access to
information, usually stored on a web site. All web sites have an opening menu,
a home page, which serves as the entry point to the whole site. It normally
provides information on the contents of the site and hyperlinks to various
directories or folders. The files themselves are usually referred to as web
pages. It is possible to skip the home page and retrieve a particular web
page by adding its exact file name and folder to the URL
(http://name-server/directory-path/folder/filename.ext). Since the launch
of the Web, both the number of Internet (or, better, Web) users and the technology
behind it have developed rapidly and continue to do so. The arrival of web
programming languages such as Java and XML have made it possible for
Internet users to search for content online, to query databases, and to ‘interact’
with web pages (online forms). The Web and the avalanche of applications it
has engendered have also consigned most early Internet applications to
oblivion. In fact, things will change even faster now that computer
manufacturers and software companies have started to build powerful
Internet ‘hooks’ into their operating systems and software (such
as in Windows ’98).
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