Talk:World Wide Web

Discussions from 2001 to September 2005 have been archived.

Improving this article

The current article strikes me as convoluted, as it evolved over a few years from a reasonable summary into a poorly-structured hodge-podge. It's time to be bold and work together in order to give the Web an article worthy of its impact on the Wide World ;-). The text should explain elementary notions in simple terms, and be more informative and complete for advanced readers. Some salient shortcomings were noted by Fredrik back in 2004 when the article was featured; sadly, most of his comments are still relevant today, so I'll copy them here to start the discussion. -- JFG 02:11, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

This article, featured on the main page today, has several problems. Parts of this article read way too much like an essay, with clear instances of POV and/or original, subjective interpretation ("these bold visions", "beyond text", also see "Publishing web pages" comment on talk). The overall structure is poor; the order and choice of sections seems arbitrary. For example, the "Java and Javascript" section should rather be called "Dynamic content", or something similar, and cover more than these two particular technologies. The section says nothing useful about what dynamic content is and what it is supposed to be good for. The "Sociological implications" section is vague and incomplete at best. Poor writing: many one-sentence paragraphs, missing wikilinks. Sub-standard choice of images. And perhaps the worst problem: this article is blatantly incomprehensive; there is almost nothing on types of websites, search engines, organization of the web and websites, the web's role in commerce, and probably many things I didn't think about. In my opinion, this article could use a rewrite from the ground up. Fredrik | talk 18:35, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Call for help with a major rewrite proposal. This article needs some love: come and submit your ideas! -- JFG 04:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Is that fat section on the pronunciation of 'www' in various languages (and dialects!) really necessary? It seems like there's gotta be something more important that could replace it.

I think it's relevant. It provides one interesting angle on how various peoples around the world have approached the problem of concisely referring to a network service that purports to call itself "World Wide." --Coolcaesar 22:48, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

graphic

the graphic violates wikipedias policies about not being self-referential. this article is about the www, there is no reason why we should display it as revolving around wikipedia. 69.22.42.35 20:59, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

HTTP cookie

I have submitted the article HTTP cookie for peer review (I am posting this notice here as this article is related). Comments are welcome here: Wikipedia:Peer review/HTTP cookie. Thanks. - Liberatore(T) 16:57, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Jean Armo(u?)r Polly

Coolcaesar claims that the name of the librarian who coined the term "surfing the Web" is Jean Armour Polly. There's a "netiquette" site that someone tried to refer to by an one-word article Net-mom called Net-Mom], where the owner signs herself Jean Armour Polly (see bottom of front page). Her biography on the site claims that she's the inventor of the phrase "surfing the Internet". So I'd say that his point is documented. I'll write her a page. --Alvestrand 06:51, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Origins

I think it should be a little clearer that internet hypertext appeared in Gopher before the invention of WWW. I believe WAIS also predates WWW. The "brilliant breakthrough" paragraph makes an incorrect statement in this regard. It should also be mentioned that HTML is based on SGML, with a link to that mark-up language.

Gopher wasn't hypertext. It had directories (lists of terms) and files (text). No links within the texts. WAIS was a search tool; again, not hypertext. Alvestrand 22:31, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The Origins section does nothing to make it clear why the Web is even called a Web, or what was web-like about it. For early users of the Web, before search engines existed, it was clear that the structure was web-like. Unidirectional links allowed users to branch out in a completely unstructured way. Subsequent material may or may not have linked back to the source of the link, and may not have been directly related. For most users of the modern Web, its usage is more structured and hierarchical. Often, a search engine is the starting point, and hyperlinks generally point to areas deeper within and more specific to a given site. This differs from the earlier model when a typical website contained numerous links to discussions of related subjects or keywords on unrelated sites.

Hypertext certainly predates HTTP, as do other protocols. The general issue of what protocols were in common use, such as Gopher, or Archie, or any others that may have allowed searching, are not truly related to the Web, although they are part of Internet history. Since the Web was not a search based medium, but a hypertext based one, HTTP did not truly replace protocols such as Gopher. It was really search engines, which are tools accessible by HTTP, that replaced Gopher. Hypertext itself, in its earlier uses, had nothing to do with the Internet per se. Its first mainstream use was on Apple computers, although the concept was much older. Likewise, the first mainstream use of hypertext on the Internet is the Web itself. Although Berners Lee had an earlier hypertext tool on the Internet, it was not widely recognized. 23 May 2006

I believe the Origins section was actually better a couple of years ago, though I'm not 100% sure. The problem is that this article is vandalized on an hourly basis, and it's often edited by inexperienced, immature, or uneducated users, so the article as a whole is in very bad shape. --Coolcaesar 19:49, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

“World-Wide Web” with a hyphen?

Should “World-Wide Web” rather be written with a hyphen? -- Wegner8 17:09, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Might have been a reasonable suggestion in 1992, but now it's too late - it's been firmly established that it's non-hyphenated. --Alvestrand 17:19, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Minitel, Telidon, Nabu Network

I have been somewhat bold and added a subsection to origins to briefly discuss earlier similar information delivery technologies such as the ones mentioned in the section head just above. I think what I added could be substantially improved and encourage all and sundry to do so

• My terminology (system/information delivery/...) may be off - I am not an expert in the field
• Maybe this is not the right article for it, perhaps History of the Internet instead.

-- Martinp 22:25, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Please don't do that. No intelligent person confuses videotex with the Web today. Of course, in 2001, British Telecom had the bright idea of trying to claim that one of its old videotex patents encompassed hypertext and sued Prodigy (now part of SBC, which is now AT&T). The case never got to trial, since the defense got it kicked out on summary judgment because videotex and the Web are so different. The biggest difference (which is what the BT case ultimately turned on) is the fact that the Web and the Internet are both decentralized while videotex was always heavily centralized.--Coolcaesar 06:36, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I'm going to be bold and delete the section. There is no reason to have a discussion of videotex in the World Wide Web article, which is way too long as is. There are already numerous articles on videotex and the various videotex systems on Wikipedia.--Coolcaesar 06:37, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Not trying to have a discussion of videotex, or thinking that they get confused. I just think that it's good to mention and point to other technologies which tried to do something similar (which is e.g. Nabu network not just videotex) even though they failed. Just as it is interesting to mention various forks of prehistoric humans (e.g. Neanderthals) in a history of human evolution, even though we are not directly descended from them and would not confuse them. But I won't force the issue -- it was a bold suggestion from someone who was searching where to hang Nabu Network, which has some if marginal interest -- though I'd appreciate alternative suggestions on where else in the whole tree of evolution of the internet/www/networked information/interactive information exchange it ought be mentioned in. Martinp 19:02, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Inaccurate definition

The article kicks off with the following text. If its intended to be a definition, its wrong; if its introductory, its misleading:

WWW is The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system.

The errors are:

• information,not documents
• not restricted to http
• need not be acessible to users
• need not (and often does not) use point and click

--Nantonos 20:48, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

This definition was plagarized from the American Heritage Dictionary (http://www.bartleby.com/61/78/W0227850.html).

More errors

text based

Prior to the release of Mosaic, the Web was text based

No. The first Web browser, on the NeXT, had both text and graphics (although not mixed together). The second one, because not everyone had a high-end workstation, ran on basic text erminals. Other browsers, such as Viola, followed. What Mosaic did was to allow graphics to be displayed inline in the text. Unfortunately, Marc based the Mosaic code on the widely available dumb terminal browsers rather than the more fully featured ones. --Nantonos 20:57, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Why this article is a mess

I haven't been following this article closely and I didn't realize it has become such a MESS. I just reviewed the article history carefully. Major screw-ups include Ryguillian's 2004 replacement of what was the technically correct definition with the W3C's politically correct one (see [1]), and severe vandalism in October 2005 by user 202.124.147.147 (see [2]) and others shortly thereafter. I suggest a revert back to the last good version at 9 October 2005.[3] Does everyone else concur on this? --Coolcaesar 23:22, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

It's hard from your links to see what you're referring to - only the middle one shows a diff. I haven't been following this article much either but I would be wary of a wholesale revert of over 7 months' work - there must have been some worthwhile additions in that time too, I would have thought. --Nigelj 09:31, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

I also disagree with reverting to such an old version, although it was more coherent. Thanks for finding some gems in earlier versions; you should bring the deleted paragraphs back to life. Nantonos also makes some good points in the discussion above. I'm glad to see that some people care, so let's go ahead and clear the mess together! -- JFG 23:03, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite proposal

Recent comments have encouraged me to create a major rewrite proposal. This article needs some love: come and submit your ideas! -- JFG 04:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)