Talk:World Wide Web

This article is a bunch of malarkey

Where is there a reference for definition of world wide web? It is so much more than hyper text linked documents. To say that Tim is the inventor is nonsense. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 15:21, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Can you be any more specific? What's wrong with it? What's missing? Andy Dingley (talk) 16:35, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Yes, you know the rules - show us the refs that tell us what else it is, and who else invented it, and we'll discuss the proposed text changes. --Nigelj (talk) 16:48, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Without a ref to a definition of the world wide web, this article is total garbage. The world wide web is not what this article implies it is. I suggest this article get deleted. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 19:12, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Have you ever actually read Berners-Lee's writings? As in his essays, books, etc. If you haven't read them, you have no idea what you're talking about. The definition at the top of the article is fully consistent with that of Berners-Lee and Cailliau, both at the beginning and as developed throughout the 1990s. And have you actually visited CERN? --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:24, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like it should be easy for you to come up with a reference then. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 21:57, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

The references are right in there. Please be specific on what you think is wrong or incomplete, we can't read your mind. But let me try:

• If your objection is that Berners-Lee wasn't the first to use hyperlinked documents nor the first to marry them with the internet, I agree that some rewording and some more references to prior technology such as Gopher and MIT Athena may be in order.
• If your objection is that the web is much more than hyperlinked documents, and quickly took the role of a universal application interface platform, starting with the addition of forms, I agree that the article should probably be extended to cover that better. Rp (talk) 11:37, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

TBL invented the World Wide Web which runs on the Internet backbone, so without him you likely as not wouldn't be writing on here now to complain.

Just because some people don't understand the difference between the Internet and the WWW is no reason for trying to claim TBL didn't invent the WWW, it is plainly obvious to anyone that that's just what he did. And being a network standard the WWW is in no way dependant on the Internet for its use, it just happened that way, indeed the WWW could just as easily be re-written to use any other network protocol, and thus an alternative network. Thus the WWW is not dependant on the existence of the Internet.

The fact is that before TBL devised the WWW the usage of the Internet was restricted to a few institutions around the world, and without him and the WWW it likely as not still would be.

... and it is noticeable that here on Wikipedia whenever a British-related subject is involved there is always someone trying to dispute or negate any article, a factor that is absent from talk pages on articles about just about every other country or nationality here on Wiikpedia. If one were being unkind one could be forgiven for thinking that some people from other nations have inferiority complexes about such things.

...and in addition, if some of the readers on here are under the misapprehension that the development of the computer was confined to their own particular country then I suggest they try reading some of the articles below:

• Manchester computers
• Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine
• Manchester Mark 1
• Automatic Computing Engine
• Pilot ACE
• Ferranti Mark 1
• Harwell CADET
• Ferranti Mercury - installed at CERN in 1958
• Metrovick 950
• Atlas computer
• English Electric DEUCE

... plus a load more I cannot be bothered linking.

... and I nearly forgot about Colossus.

... "Those who need to know, DO know."— Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.148.221.72 (talk) 10:26, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Death Link

Hello please change the link under references number 26. (dead link) to http://www.ejoni.com/blog-the-world-wide-web-722 . thank you ! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Danielejoni (talk • contribs) 20:33, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello, and thank you for your suggestion. The link you suggested would not be appropriate as a reference, because it is a rogue copy of the archived content on a commercial website; I have updated the link to the actual archived version of the original URL instead. --bonadea contributions talk 22:14, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

Alternative image

A more complete image of the first webserver:

©Geni (talk) 15:12, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

relation of WWW and DNS

A recent change to longstanding wording, "partially built on the Domain Name System", to "built on top of the Domain Name System" is confusing. I can operate without the DNS so it's not built on top of it, but only partially. Walter Görlitz (talk) 14:07, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

The WWW is built atop DNS like the Empire State Building is built atop the Earth's core. There is no relation worth mentioning.

To say "partially built on" is to give an excessive implication that use of DNS is optional. It is (names can be resolved locally by hostfiles, or by using explicit IPs) but this would be peculiar and not deserving of specific mention. You might as well state, "The Web uses port 80, or sometimes port 8080". Andy Dingley (talk) 15:25, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm not happy with the opening sentence as it now stands, apparently starting with this edit. Thevideodrome (talk · contribs) said, "added a bit about the Domain Name System." We have stuff about DNS in the Function section, as well as under WWW prefix. Sure we summarise the main points of the article in the lede section, but I don't think that DNS is so central to the web that it needs to appear in sucha summary, much less as the whole second half of the all-important opening sentence.

Per wp:lede, we don't need citations in the lede section for well-cited and non-controversial material that already appears in the body of the article, so why do we have a citation for this opening sentence? Worse still, we cite it to the whole http://www.w3.org website! The front page of this website (where that link lands) is a regularly updated news page that has different content on it day by day, so this citation is worse than useless. I have put a new subsection heading below, because I'd like to discuss improving the opening sentence in more general terms. --Nigelj (talk) 17:17, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

I've just noticed that the reference to DNS is described as 'longstanding wording' at the top of this section. I don't think that's quite true, unless you count 'since yesterday' as longstanding. I've traced the opening sentence back as far as June 2012 (1,000 edits back) and I'm still seeing 'a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.' with no mention of DNS. --Nigelj (talk) 17:28, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Opening sentence improvement

Looking around the w3.org site, we find here that the W3C themselves use our own definition of internet (from the opening sentence of that article), but they don't use our definition for the WWW from this article. They say it "is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)." That is in three parts: (1) 'information space', which we mimic with 'information system', (2) 'resources', which we call 'hypertext documents', and (3) 'URIs', which is where we take a different tack, talking about 'interlinked hypertext'. I'm happy with our difference at (3), as from the W3C definition there would be no reason why it is called a 'web', rather than being a simple list of documents each with a unique URI. Looking at their own cited longer document,[1] I think it's clear that they want to get on and introduce the three main technical pillars - URIs, HTTP, and HTML - and so introducing one of them right up front works well.

For my part, I'd like to agree with them in item (1) and use the phrase 'information space', because 'information system' sounds to me like a piece of software that would run on one machine, or maybe a cluster, or even a whole datacentre, but the web is much much bigger and more diverse than this. I think 'space' is more appropriate than 'system'. Regarding (2), I'm not so sure. Web resource is the correct term, but it is a technical term, that is a slightly unusual usage of a more common word. To most people, a resource is raw material or a source of raw materials. If they work in HR, they may think of a resource as a person, or if they think like a senior manager they may think of a department or a building or a piece of equipment or plant. For it to refer to a document or image takes another leap of knowledge. We cover the term well in the body of the article (23 mentions), but I don't think we need to have it dominate the opening sentence, per the principle of least astonishment. For (3) I prefer our approach, as I described above.

I propose the following for the opening sentence:

The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URIs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet.

--Nigelj (talk) 17:17, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

The term information space is a rather nebulous term that doesn't mean anything specific. The WP article for the term is equally nebulous. There is no implication in the term information system that limits it in scope. Kbrose (talk) 13:23, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

Per WP:V, "All material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists and captions, must be verifiable." Do you have a citation, better than the W3C, that the web is an 'information system'? I think the W3C's use of the more nebulous term is exactly correct in that the web as a whole is a rather nebulous thing. As I said above, "'information system' sounds to me like a piece of software that would run on one machine, or maybe a cluster, or even a whole datacentre". But ultimately it doesn't matter what you and I think, it's what the preponderance of reliable sources say that matters, and nothing else. Please provide a source. --Nigelj (talk) 20:30, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

In the absence of any citation supporting information system in the opening definition, I'm going to go with information space per W3C. --Nigelj (talk) 22:01, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

visualizations of the world wide web

user:kbrose reverted my contribution of a graphic depicting a visualization of the largest publically available world wide web crawl c.f.: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=World_Wide_Web&oldid=665200196 I am confused because the article Internet also has a visualization and in my oppinion there is inherent encyclopedic value to preserve such a graphic which was contributed to the free knowledge base by a researcher. I would like to hear what others have to say. The graphic in question can be found on: File:Visualization_of_the_world_wide_web_common_crawl_2012.png --Renepick (talk) 17:45, 2 June 2015 (UTC)

The graphic frankly shows very little if anything useful. It's even hard to see just what it is that is there. How does this add value to the article? Just what does it actually show and what is the meaning of it? The fact that the Internet article has another one of these useless gimmicks, is not an argument for inclusion. Kbrose (talk) 13:18, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

why don't you remove this useless gimmick from the other article then? Since we are two authors of opposite opinion I would love to hear what others have to say? These kind of visualizations are being created over the time in the research community and give people an impression of the topology of the web graph (though visualizing such a large graph can obviously only be an approximation) it is the same as for contries in these articles you also show a map or for the earth you also have a picture. Why not having one for the world wide web? --Renepick (talk) 17:30, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

You are free to write an article about such graphics, viz. this particular one, that provides the context needed for this graph to be useful. The fact that someone did the research to create it, by itself, doesn't make a good case to show it out of context, where its meaning is lost. The fact that many such factoids exist on WP, does not justify the case. Kbrose (talk) 16:45, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

A world map is accurate, it displays actual, actionable information. This picture does not: if it displays any information at all, it isn't clear to the reader what that information is. Using the term "approximation" to describe it seems overly generous. Sure, we can aggregate the WWW into a graph of a few nodes and links, but the nodes don't appear to stand for anything specific, they may just as well be the arbitrary results of the clustering method chosen, which isn't clear either: the description says it's "the Louvain method" applied to "Web Data Commons - Hyperlink Graph 2012", so I'll need to study clustering methods and web data sets before I can understand the information content of this image. Note that the picture displaying part of the Wikipedia link graph doesn't have this problem - it is immediately clear what is being visualized there, at least to me. Rp (talk) 15:59, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Social Impact of the WWW

I think we need to start a new section covering the social impact of the web and the long-term implications of the technology.Twobells^t@lk 10:13, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

"Deep Web"

The usage and primary topic of Deep Web is under discussion, see talk:Dark Web -- 67.70.32.190 (talk) 03:48, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

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The Web And What Tim Berners-Lee And CERN Say About It...

I have been rather concerned at some of the changes to this page. Firstly, Tim Berners-Lee states that he invented the World Wide Web in 1989 - http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ - and this information surely belongs in the opening paragraph of the page? We should then move on to details of how the invention became a reality in the early 1990s. Here's a 2014 article from CERN celebrating the 1989 "Birth of the Web" -

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/03/world-wide-web-born-cern-25-years-ago

I have linked to both on the article page.

Whilst I admire and respect other Wikipedia editors, I think that some of the recently supplied information may be straying a little far from the point. And at least one of the illustrations (mosaic section) contains the information that the web was invented by Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau - which it was not. Although an enthusiastic supporter of Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau did not invent the Web. Lastly, the information that Berners-Lee states in his book "Weaving The Web" that he visualised creating a web-like system whilst at school is incorrect. Berners-Lee makes no such statement. I have made a few alterations here, but I do not want to upset other editors and ask that reference is made to Mr Berner Lee's own pages, and CERN, etc, and that thought is given to keep the page to the point and readable to people seeking relevant information.

(Etheldavis (talk) 03:58, 29 September 2015 (UTC))

According to this : http://internethalloffame.org/inductees/robert-cailliau

We can say without a doubt that Robert Cailliau was not a enthusiast supporter but a co-inventor. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bongo76 (talk • contribs) 08:56, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

The Internet and cats

Please swing by and help improve this new article! :D--Coin945 (talk) 03:30, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

without been muslim don.t die. sister freelove is harm full for you so contract with others for honesty — Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.48.0.115 (talk) 04:08, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

without been muslim don.t die. sister freelove is harm full for you so contract with others for honesty — Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.48.0.115 (talk) 04:10, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Robert Cailliau ?

Should Robert Cailliau be listed in the lead as equal co-inventor of the web, alongside Tim Berners-Lee? There is edit-warring going on at present to push this into the article. [2] [3] (and others). Andy Dingley (talk) 09:29, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

• Oppose Cailliau was involved, but not the primary innovator. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:29, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

• OfCourse If you read the article, it is wrote that the proposal of Tim Benners-lee did not go through, but the one he wrote with Cailliau lead to the creation of the World Wild Web. So he is clearly co-inventor, reason why I will revert your change.--Bongo76 (talk) 09:37, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Before you do that, I would suggest reading WP:EDITWAR. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:40, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

     Sorry I didn't know about it, and goes to quick to revert.--Bongo76 (talk) 09:51, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Bongo76. Cailliau appears as co-inventor in many articles and he's clearly awarded with that in plenty of article available in the web. 141.143.212.233 (talk) 09:49, 18 May 2016 (UTC)Lionel Tesolin

From when would you date the innovation of the WWW? From when would you date Cailliau's involvement? How many years apart are these?

Why was Cailliau not part of the Queen Elizabeth prize, shared between five? http://home.cern/about/updates/2013/03/ps1-million-engineering-prize-honours-web-pioneers

Andy Dingley (talk) 09:59, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

   Andy let's go to the proposal of the WorldWideWeb on "https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html" Is it firmed by Tim Berners-lee alone or Tim Berners-lee and Robert Cailliau ?--Bongo76 (talk) 12:24, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Tim Berners Lee alone invented the World Wide Web and wrote the first web browser. We must be careful when browsing the Web as not all information is accurate and I have come across the Calliau assertion myself, but reliable sources, including CERN - http://home.cern/topics/birth-web , state that the work was Berners Lee's alone. He re-submitted the same proposal in 1990. Robert Cailliau was a great support to Berners Lee, but he has never stated he invented the Web. We must remember that it is not just a case of what we can find written on the Web to support our viewpoints, Wiki policy states that the sources must be reliable. Do read all the available information on the Web at CERN. It's fascinating. (Etheldavis (talk) 12:43, 18 May 2016 (UTC))

W3org and CERN are Reliable, in both of them you find document accrediting that Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau are co-inventor of the web. You decide to ignore those document because you prefer to think that Tim Berners-Lee is the only inventor of the world wide web. Your sources : an article of opinion and the web site of a foundation created by Tim Berners-Lee ... Perhaps you should first apply your advice to yourself, and be cautious when you publish an opinion!--Bongo76 (talk) 13:30, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Also take a look at this from the World Wide Web foundation - http://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/

(Etheldavis (talk) 12:47, 18 May 2016 (UTC))

     So what you are telling is that a foundation created by Tim Berners-Lee sais that Tim Berners-lee is the inventor and the only inventor of the Web? --Bongo76 (talk) 13:18, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

This CERN article states that Robert Cailliau was Berners Lee's first collaborator on the project - http://home.cern/images/2014/02/robert-cailliau-web-pioneer , but he was not co-inventor.

(Etheldavis (talk) 12:50, 18 May 2016 (UTC))

  In one article from the CERN : "Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web (link is external) [PDF] at CERN in 1989, further refining the proposal with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau the following year. On 12 November 1990 the pair published  a formal proposal outlining principal concepts and defining important terms behind the web. The document described a "hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" in which a "web" of "hypertext documents" could be viewed by “browsers”." 
   This show clearly that the pair(Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau) are co-inventor of the World Wide Web.Bongo76 (talk) 13:18, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

The first proposal is the initial invention - which sets out the vision from which the Web sprang. Inventions are always rtefined and honed as they are developed.

(Etheldavis (talk) 13:33, 18 May 2016 (UTC))

  An intention(first draft, intial proposal) is not an invention, an invention is a finish product, and in this case "The Formal Proposal".Bongo76 (talk) 13:44, 18 May 2016 (UTC) 

Maria Dimou of CERN writes on the subject in a 2014 article on the Web to celebrate the anniversary of the Web's invention - http://home.cern/cern-people/opinion/2014/03/not-all-vague-and-much-more-exciting (Etheldavis (talk) 12:56, 18 May 2016 (UTC))

  As you can read in the URL, it is an opinion,so not a source of truth, the fact that Maria Dimou do not name Robert Cailliau as co-inventor of the web, does not mean he isn't !Bongo76 (talk) 13:18, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Surely the fact that CERN, the organisation that hosted the invention of the Web, doesn't, is rather more telling?

(Etheldavis (talk) 13:28, 18 May 2016 (UTC))

I agree and as shown before it is writing there that they are co-inventor, thanks for giving me reason !Bongo76 (talk) 13:33, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

I'm afraid I can't communicate with you further on this subject as I don't feel it would be constructive. With all due respect, I do not understand your logic on this occasion. My very best wishes to you. (Etheldavis (talk) 13:35, 18 May 2016 (UTC))