Web 1.0

Web 1.0 was an early stage of the conceptual evolution of the World Wide Web, centered around a top-down approach to the use of the web and its user interface. Socially, users could only view webpages but not contribute to the content of the webpages. According to Cormode, G. and Krishnamurthy, B. (2008): "content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content." Technically, Web 1.0 webpage's information is closed to external editing. Thus, information is not dynamic, being updated only by the webmaster. Economically, revenue generated from the web was made by concentrating on the most visited webpages, the head and software's cycle releases. Technologically, Web 1.0 concentrated on presenting, not creating so that user-generated content was not available.

History

The hyperlinks between webpages began with the release of the world wide web(www) to the public in 1993, and describe the Web before the "bursting of the dot-com bubble" in 2001. Even so the terms web 1.0 and 2.0 were given birth together (see: Web 2.0#History), Web 2.0 capabilities were present in the days of Web 1.0 (see:Web 2.0#Criticism)

Since 2004, the term "Web 2.0" characterizes the changes to the social web, especially the current business models of sites on the World Wide Web.

Characteristics

Terry Flew, in his 3rd Edition of New Media described what he believed to characterize the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

"move from personal websites to blogs and blog site aggregation, from publishing to participation, from web content as the outcome of large up-front investment to an ongoing and interactive process, and from content management systems to links based on tagging (folksonomy)".

Flew believed it to be the above factors that form the basic change in trends that resulted in the onset of the Web 2.0 "craze".

As well as such adjustments to the Internet, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is a direct result of the change in the behavior of those who use the World Wide Web.

Web 1.0 trends included worries over privacy concerns resulting in a one-way flow of information, through websites which contained "read-only" material. Now, during Web 2.0, the use of the Web can be characterized as the decentralization of website content, which is now generated from the "bottom-up", with many users being contributors and producers of information, as well as the traditional consumers.

To take an example from above, personal web pages were common in Web 1.0, and these consisted of mainly static pages hosted on free hosting services such as Geocities. Nowadays, dynamically generated blogs and social networking profiles, such as Myspace and Facebook, are more popular, allowing for readers to comment on posts in a way that was not available during Web 1.0.

At the Technet Summit in November 2006, Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, stated a simple formula for defining the phases of the Web:

Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average 1 megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.

— Reed Hastings

Web 1.0 design elements

Some design elements of a Web 1.0 site include:

• Static pages instead of dynamic HTML, user-generated content.
• The use of framesets.
• The use of tables to position and align elements on a page. These were often used in combination with "spacer" GIFs (1x1 pixel transparent images in the GIF format.)
• Proprietary HTML extensions, such as the <blink> and <marquee> tags, introduced during the first browser war.
• Online guestbooks.
• GIF buttons, typically 88x31 pixels in size promoting web browsers and other products.
• HTML forms sent via email. A user would fill in a form, and upon clicking submit their email client would attempt to send an email containing the form's details.

See also

• History of the Internet
• Web 2.0