History of the World Wide Web

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World Wide Web
InventorTim Berners-Lee
Inception12 March 1989; 33 years ago (1989-03-12)
AvailableWorldwide
History of computing
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The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or, simply, "the Web") is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

Precursors emerged in the form of hyperlinked applications during the mid and late 1980s (the bare concept of hyperlinking had by then existed for some decades). Following these, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and developed in 1990 both the first web server, and the first web browser, called WorldWideWeb.[1][2]

Web pages were initially conceived as structured documents based upon Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which can allow access to images, video, and other content. Hyperlinks in the page permit users to navigate to other pages. In the earliest browsers, images opened in a separate "helper" application. HTML evolved during the 1990s, leading to HTML 4 which introduced large elements of CSS styling and, later, extensions to allow browser code to make calls and ask for content from servers in a structured way (AJAX). Many other browsers were soon developed, with Marc Andreessen's 1993 Mosaic (later Netscape Navigator),[3] being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the Internet boom of the 1990s.[4] It was a graphical browser which ran on several popular office and home computers,[5] bringing multimedia content to non-technical users by including images and text on the same page, unlike previous browser designs.[6]

The Web began to enter general use in 1993-4, when graphical websites for everyday use started to become available.[7] Commercial use restrictions were lifted in 1995 when NSFNET was shut down. Competition between web browsers was dominated by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera and Safari.[8] Commercialization of the Web, and associated economic factors, led to the dot-com boom and bust in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Today, the Web is ubiquitous in everyday life.[9][10]

Background[edit]

See also: History of the Internet and History of hypertext

The underlying concept of hypertext as a user interface paradigm originated in projects in the 1960s, from research such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) by Andries van Dam at Brown University, IBM Generalized Markup Language, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS).[11] Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based memex, which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".[12][13] Other precursors were research from FRESS, Intermedia, and others. Paul Otlet's Mundaneum project has also been named as an early 20th-century precursor of the Web.

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to experiment with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to a page.

As the Internet grew through the 1980s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and use information. By 1985, the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being.[14] Many small, self-contained hypertext systems were created, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard (1987).

Berners-Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December, but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and considered its problems of information management: physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet they lacked common machines and any shared presentation software. Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN, TCP/IP protocols were installed on Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe within a few years. In 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.[15]

1989–1993: Origins and development[edit]

CERN[edit]

The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server.
The corridor where the World Wide Web was born, on the ground floor of building No. 1 at CERN.

While working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers.[16] On 12 March 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled "Information Management: A Proposal",[17][18] to the management at CERN. The proposal used the term "web", and was based on "a large hypertext database with typed links". It described a system called "Mesh" that referenced ENQUIRE, the database and software project he had built in 1980, with a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded as text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word hypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners-Lee goes on to use the term hypermedia.[19]

Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his manager, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including Information Mesh, The Information Mine or Mine of Information, but settled on World Wide Web. Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate his vision.

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested to members of both technical communities that a marriage between the two technologies was possible. But, when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:

While inventing and working on setting up the Web, Berners-Lee spent most of his working hours in Building 31 (second floor) at CERN (46.2325°N 6.0450°E), but also at his two homes, one in France, one in Switzerland.

With help from Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, abbreviated "W3" and later renamed Nexus) as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.[21][22] The proposal was modelled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within HyTime, but it was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration.[citation needed]

At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the first web server was about a month from completing its first successful test. This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available". While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom.[23]

By December 1990, Berners-Lee and his work team had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a web editor), the first web server (later known as CERN httpd) and the first web site (http://info.cern.ch) containing the first web pages that described the project itself was published on 20 December 1990.[24][25] The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the web server and also to write the web browser.[26]

The CERN data centre in 2010 housing some WWW servers.

The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of University of North Carolina (UNC) announced in May 2013 that Berners-Lee gave him what he says is the oldest known web page during a visit to UNC in 1991. Jones stored it on a magneto-optical drive and his NeXT computer.[27] CERN put the oldest known web page back online in 2014, complete with hyperlinks that helped users get started and helped them navigate what was then a very small web.

On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext.[28] This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier. As another example of such confusion, some news media reported that the first photo on the Web was published by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story, writing that media were "totally distorting our words for the sake of cheap sensationalism".[29]

The World Wide Web had several differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn, presented the chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.

In January 1991 the first web servers outside CERN were switched on. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, inviting collaborators. This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier.

Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to host the SPIRES-HEP database and display SLAC's catalog of online documents.[30][31][32][33] This was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America. The www-talk mailing list was started in the same month.

The WorldWideWeb browser only ran on NeXTSTEP. Working with Berners-Lee at CERN, Nicola Pellow wrote a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer, the Line Mode Browser, which worked with a command-line interface. Subsequently, ViolaWWW became the recommended browser at CERN. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers. The Web was successful at CERN, and spread to other scientific and academic institutions. In two years, there were 50 websites in the world.[34]

In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, withdrew support Berners-Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as results and comments from CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT resources. Following this decision, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN despite many of his peers in the IT center advocating for his support, in particular, M. Ben Segal from the distributed computing SHIFT project. He left for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to develop HTTP.

For his work in developing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee received the Millennium technology prize in 2004.[35]

An early CERN-related contribution to the Web was the parody band Les Horribles Cernettes, whose promotional image is believed to be among the Web's first five pictures. The photo was scanned as a GIF file, using Adobe Photoshop on a Macintosh.

From Gopher to the WWW[edit]

In the early 1990s, other projects such as Archie, Gopher, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data.

In 1991, the University of Minnesota released the document browsing system for the Internet they called Gopher. Invented by Mark P. McCahill, it became the first commonly used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way. In less than a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers.[36] It offered a viable alternative to the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the consensus was that Gopher would be the primary way that people would interact with the Internet.[37] However, in 1993, the University of Minnesota declared that Gopher was proprietary and would have to be licensed.[36]

In response, on 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due, and put their code into the public domain.[38] Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this spurred the development of various browsers which precipitated a rapid shift away from Gopher.[39] By releasing Berners-Lee's invention for public use, CERN encouraged and enabled its widespread use.[40]

NCSA[edit]

Main article: Mosaic (web browser)

Historians generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the 1993 introduction of the Mosaic web browser,[41][42] a graphical web browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (NCSA-UIUC). The development was led by Marc Andreessen, while funding came from the US High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by US Senator Al Gore.[43]

Before the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages, and the Web was less popular than older protocols such as Gopher and WAIS. Mosaic could display inline images[44] and submit forms[45][46] for Windows, Macintosh and X-Windows. NCSA also developed HTTPd, a Unix web server that used the Common Gateway Interface to process forms and Server Side Includes for dynamic content. Both the client and server were free to use with no restrictions.[47] Mosaic was an immediate hit;[48] its graphical user interface allowed the Web to become by far the most popular protocol on the Internet. Within a year, web traffic surpassed Gopher's.[36] Wired declared that Mosaic made non-Internet online services obsolete,[49] and the Web became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet.

Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by search enginess.

After 1993 the World Wide Web saw many advances to indexing and ease of access through search engines, which often neglected Gopher and Gopherspace. As popularity increased through ease of use, investment incentives also grew until in the middle of 1994 the Web's popularity gained the upper hand. Then it became clear that Gopher and the other projects were doomed to fall short.[50] There were still Gopher servers as of 2006, although there were a great many more web servers by that time.

1993–1995: The Web goes public, early growth[edit]

In keeping with its birth at CERN and the first page opened, early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as Fermilab and SLAC. By January 1993 there were fifty web servers across the world. By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online. Two of the earliest webcomics started on the Web in 1993: Doctor Fun and NetBoy.[verification needed] In July 1993, The Wharton School published one of the first collections of PDFs and was highlighted in Adobe's 1995 annual report about use of PDFs on the web.

The Web began to enter general use in 1993–1994, when websites for everyday use started to become available. By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still relatively small, but many notable websites were already active that foreshadowed or inspired today's most popular services.[7] An important event held on January 11, 1994, was The Superhighway Summit at UCLA's Royce Hall. This was the "first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialogue about the Information Superhighway and its implications."[51]

Mosaic was superseded in 1994 by Andreessen's Netscape Navigator, which became the world's most popular browser. While it held this title for some time, eventually competition from Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely replaced it.

Connected by the Internet, thousands and then millions of websites were created around the world. This motivated international standards development for protocols and formatting. Berners-Lee continued to stay involved in guiding the development of web standards, such as the markup languages to compose web pages and he advocated his vision of a Semantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) based around machine-readability and interoperability standards.

The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet.[52] Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, World Wide Web is not synonymous with Internet.[53] The Web is an information space containing hyperlinked documents and other resources, identified by their URIs.[54] It is implemented as both client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP.

Practical media distribution and streaming media over the Web was made possible by advances in data compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. An important compression technique in this regard is the discrete cosine transform (DCT), a lossy compression algorithm originally developed by Nasir Ahmed, T. Natarajan and K. R. Rao at the University of Texas in 1973. Following the introduction of the Web, several DCT-based media formats were introduced for practical media distribution and streaming over the Web, including the MPEG video format in 1991 and the JPEG image format in 1992. The high level of image compression made JPEG a good format for compensating slow Internet access speeds, typical in the age of dial-up Internet access. JPEG became the most widely used image format for the World Wide Web. A DCT variation, the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm, developed by J. P. Princen, A. W. Johnson and A. B. Bradley at the University of Surrey in 1987, led to the development of MP3, which was introduced in 1994 and became the first popular audio format on the Web.

In the US, the online service America Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser, using a dial-up Internet connection.

In January 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University. Yahoo! Directory, launched in January 1994, became the first popular web directory. Yahoo! Search, later launched in 1995, became the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential example of a first mover on the Web.

1995–2004: Commercialization, dot-com boom and bust, aftermath[edit]

1997 advertisement in State Magazine by the US State Department Library for sessions introducing the then-unfamiliar Web.

Web commerce began emerging in 1995 with the founding of eBay by Pierre Omidyar and Amazon by Jeff Bezos. With the release of Windows 95 and the popular Internet Explorer browser, it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was no longer optional.[citation needed] Though at first people saw mainly[citation needed] the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. More dot-coms, displaying products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web.

24 Hours in Cyberspace, "the largest one-day online event" (February 8, 1996) up to that date, took place on the then-active website, cyber24.com.[55][56] It was headed by photographer Rick Smolan.[57] A photographic exhibition was unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History on January 23, 1997, featuring 70 photos from the project.[58]

Faster Broadband internet connections replaced many dial-up connections from the beginning of the 2000s.

Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of those systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web but all continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared.

As the Web grew, numerous search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, corresponding with the rise of Google Search, which developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.

During the dot-com bubble, many companies vied to create a dominant web portal in the belief that such a website would best be able to attract a large audience that in turn would attract online advertising revenue. While most of these portals offered a search engine, they weren't interested in encouraging users to find other websites and leave the portal and instead concentrated on "sticky" content.[59] In contrast, Google was a stripped-down search engine that delivered superior results.[60] It was a hit with users who switched from portals to Google. Furthermore, with AdWords, Google had an effective business model.[61][62]

With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many web portals either scaled back operations, floundered,[63] or shut down entirely.[64][65][66]

2004–present: Ubiquity, Web 2.0, Web3[edit]

By the mid-2000s, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as Weblogs and RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange, primarily featuring user-generated and user-edited websites, was dubbed Web 2.0, a term coined in 1999 and popularized in 2004 at the Web 2.0 Conference. The Web 2.0 boom saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a newly democratized Web.

This new era also begot social networking websites, such as Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, which gained acceptance rapidly and became a central part of youth culture. The 2010s also saw the emergence of various controversial trends, such as the expansion of cybercrime and of internet censorship.

As the Web became easier to query, it attained a greater ease of use overall and gained a sense of organization which ushered in a period of rapid popularization. Many new sites such as Wikipedia and its Wikimedia Foundation sister projects were based on the concept of user-edited content. In 2005, three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, created a video viewing website called YouTube, which quickly became popular and introduced a new concept of user-submitted content in major events.

The popularity of YouTube, Facebook, etc., combined with the increasing availability and affordability of high-speed connections has made video content far more common on all kinds of websites. Many video-content hosting and creation sites provide an easy means for their videos to be embedded on third party websites without payment or permission.

This combination of more user-created or edited content, and easy means of sharing content, such as via RSS widgets and video embedding, has led to many sites with a typical "Web 2.0" feel. They have articles with embedded video, user-submitted comments below the article, and RSS boxes to the side, listing some of the latest articles from other sites.

Continued extension of the Web has focused on connecting devices to the Internet, coined Intelligent Device Management. As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, manufacturers have started to leverage the expanded computing power of their devices to enhance their usability and capability. Through Internet connectivity, manufacturers are now able to interact with the devices they have sold and shipped to their customers, and customers are able to interact with the manufacturer (and other providers) to access a lot of new content.

Web3 (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0) is a general idea for a decentralized Internet based on public blockchains.

Browser wars[edit]

Main articles: Browser wars and History of the web browser
See also: Comparison of web browsers, List of web browsers, and Usage share of web browsers

Early browsers[edit]

Initially, a web browser was available only for the NeXT operating system. This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992, and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise, an application developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. ViolaWWW was originally an application for HyperCard. Both programs ran on the X Window System for Unix. In 1992, the first tests between browsers on different platforms were concluded successfully between buildings 513 and 31 in CERN, between browsers on the NexT station and the X11-ported Mosaic browser.

Students at the University of Kansas adapted an existing text-only hypertext browser, Lynx, to access the web. Lynx was available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers, unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a website not accessible through Lynx wasn't worth visiting.

The first Microsoft Windows browser was Cello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since access to Windows was more widespread amongst lawyers than access to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.

The Web was first popularized by Mosaic, a graphical browser launched in 1993 by Marc Andreessen's team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC). The origins of Mosaic date to 1992. In November 1992, the NCSA at the University of Illinois (UIUC) established a website. In December 1992, Andreessen and Eric Bina, students attending UIUC and working at the NCSA, began work on Mosaic with funding from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a US-federal research and development program. Andreessen and Bina released a Unix version of the browser in February 1993; Mac and Windows versions followed in August 1993. The browser gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia, and the authors’ rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.

After graduation from UIUC, Andreessen and James H. Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994 to develop the Mosaic Netscape browser commercially. The company later changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator.

The browser wars became a competition for dominance when Microsoft Windows' Internet Explorer was bundled with Windows. This led to the United States v. Microsoft Corporation antitrust lawsuit. Other major web browsers involved were Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera and Safari.

Netscape[edit]

Main article: Netscape
See also: SHTTP and Spyglass

In 1994, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen, the lead developer on Mosaic, founded Netscape and released Navigator, a browser that soon became the dominant web client. They also released the Netsite Commerce web server which could handle SSL requests thus enabling e-commerce on the Web.[67] SSL became the standard method to encrypt web traffic. Navigator 1.0 also introduced cookies, but Netscape did not publicize this feature. Netscape followed up with Navigator 2 in 1995 introducing frames, Java applets and JavaScript.

Netscape had a very successful IPO valuing the company at $2.9 billion despite the lack of profits and triggering the dot-com bubble.[68] Over the next 5 years, over a trillion dollars was raised to fund thousands of startups consisting of little more than a website. In spite of their early success, Netscape was unable to fend off Microsoft.[69] In 1998, Netscape made Navigator open source and launched Mozilla.[70] AOL bought Netscape that year[71] and then disbanded it in 2003.[72]

Internet Explorer[edit]

Main article: Internet Explorer

In 1995, Bill Gates outlined Microsoft's strategy to dominate the Internet in his Tidal Wave memo.[73] Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and released Internet Explorer 1.0 in 1995 and IE2 later that year. IE2 added features pioneered at Netscape such as cookies, SSL, and JavaScript. It was the start of a browser war between Microsoft and Netscape.

IE3, released in 1996, added support for Java applets, ActiveX, and CSS. At this point, Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows. IE3 managed to increase Microsoft's share of the browser market from under 10% to over 20%.[74]

IE4, released in 1997, introduced Dynamic HTML setting the stage for the Web 2.0 revolution. By 1998, IE was able to capture the majority of the desktop browser market.[69] It would be the dominant browser for the next fourteen years.

Chrome[edit]

Main article: Google Chrome
See also: npm and Express.js

In 2008, Google released their Chrome browser with the first JIT JavaScript engine, V8, which overtook IE to become the dominant desktop browser in four years[75] and overtook Safari to become the dominant mobile browser in two.[76] At the same time, Google open sourced Chrome's codebase, Chromium.[77]

In 2009, Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine to power an event driven runtime system, Node.js, which allowed JavaScript code to be used on servers as well as browsers. This led to the development of new software stacks such as MEAN. Thanks to frameworks such as Electron, developers can bundle up node applications as standalone desktop applications such as Slack.

In 2011, Acer and Samsung began selling Chromebooks, cheap laptops running Chrome OS capable of running web apps. Over the next decade, more companies offered Chromebooks. Chromebooks outsold MacOS devices in 2020 to become the second most popular OS in the world.[78]

In 2021, Microsoft rewrote their Edge browser to use Chromium as its code base in order to be more compatible with Chrome.[79]

Software[edit]

Further information: Comparison of web server software, Comparison of server-side web frameworks, and List of content management systems

Web server software was developed to allow computers to act as web servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications. Web framework software enabled building and deploying web applications. Content management systems (CMS) were developed to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them were built on top of separate content management frameworks.

Apache[edit]

Main article: Apache HTTP Server

After Robert McCool joined Netscape, development on the NCSA HTTPd server languished. In 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements to HTTPd.[80] They called their version of HTTPd, Apache. Apache quickly became the dominant server on the Web.[81] After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages including Perl, PHP and Python. Together with Linux and MySQL, it became known as the LAMP platform.

Following the success of Apache, the Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 and produced many open source web software projects in the same collaborative spirit.

Governance and standards[edit]

Main article: Web standards
See also: Internet Information Services, Browser extension, and Acid1

World Wide Web Conference[edit]

In April 1993, CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the concern caused by the University of Minnesota's announcement that it would begin charging license fees for its implementation of the Gopher protocol.

In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since.

World Wide Web Consortium[edit]

Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Abramatic, and Tim Berners-Lee at the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September/October 1994 in order to create standards for the Web.[82] It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet. A year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University.

W3C comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made the Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. Netscape and Microsoft, in the middle of a browser war, ignored the W3C and added elements to HTML ad hoc (e.g., blink and marquee). Finally, in 1995, Netscape and Microsoft came to their senses and agreed to abide by the W3C's standard.[83]

The W3C published the standard for HTML 4 in 1997, which included Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), giving designers more control over the appearance of web pages without the need for additional HTML tags. The W3C couldn't enforce compliance so none of the browsers were fully compliant. This frustrated web designers who formed the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998 with the goal of cajoling compliance with standards.[84] A List Apart and CSS Zen Garden were influential websites that promoted good design and adherence to standards.[85] Nevertheless, AOL halted development of Netscape[86] and Microsoft was slow to update IE.[87] Mozilla and Apple both released browsers that aimed to be more standards compliant (Firefox and Safari), but were unable to dislodge IE as the dominant browser.

Web 2.0[edit]

Main article: Web 2.0
See also: Web application, Single-page application, Dynamic web page, Rich web application, Web framework, and Web platform

As useful as the Web was, HTML pages were mainly static documents. Web pages could run JavaScript and respond to user input, but they could not interact with the network. Browsers could submit data to servers via forms and receive new pages, but this was slow compared to traditional desktop applications. Developers that wanted to offer sophisticated apps over the Web used Java or nonstandard solutions such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft's ActiveX.

In 1999, Microsoft added a little noticed feature called XMLHttpRequest to MSIE. In 2002, developers at Oddpost used this feature to create the first Ajax application- a webmail client that performed as well as a desktop application.[88] Ajax apps were revolutionary. Web pages evolved beyond static documents to full-blown applications. Websites began offering APIs in addition to webpages. Developers created a plethora of Ajax apps including widgets, mashups and new types of social apps. Analysts called it Web 2.0.[89]

Browser vendors improved the performance of their JavaScript engines[90] and dropped support for Flash and Java.[91][92] Traditional client server applications were replaced by cloud apps. Amazon reinvented itself as a cloud service provider.

WHATWG[edit]

Main article: WHATWG
See also: HTML5 and Quirks mode

In spite of the success of Web 2.0 applications, the W3C forged ahead with their plan to replace HTML with XHTML and represent all data in XML. In 2004, representatives from Mozilla, Opera, and Apple formed an opposing group, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), dedicated to improving HTML while maintaining backward compatibility.[93] For the next several years, websites did not transition their content to XHTML; browser vendors did not adopt XHTML2; and developers eschewed XML in favor of JSON.[94] By 2007, the W3C conceded and announced they were restarting work on HTML[95] and in 2009, they officially abandoned XHTML.[96] In 2019, the W3C ceded control of the HTML specification, now called the HTML Living Standard, to WHATWG.[97]

Mobile[edit]

Main article: Mobile web
See also: Mobile browser and Mobile development framework

Early attempts to allow wireless devices to access the Web used simplified formats such as i-mode and WAP.

In 2007, Apple introduced the first smartphone with a full-featured browser. Other companies followed suit and in 2011, smartphone sales overtook PCs.[98] Since 2016, most visitors access websites with mobile devices[99] which led to the adoption of responsive web design.

Apple, Mozilla, and Google have taken different approaches to integrating smartphones with modern web apps.

Apple initially promoted web apps for the iPhone, but then encouraged developers to make native apps.[100]

Mozilla announced Web APIs in 2011 to allow webapps to access hardware features such as audio, camera or GPS.[101] Frameworks such as Cordova and Ionic allow developers to build hybrid apps. Mozilla released a mobile OS designed to run web apps in 2012,[102] but discontinued it in 2015.[103]

In 2015, Google announced specifications for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)[104] and progressive web applications (PWA).[105] AMPs use a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and Web Components to optimize web pages for mobile devices; and PWAs are web pages that, with a combination of web workers and manifest files, can be saved to a mobile device and opened like a native app.

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

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Further reading[edit]

  • Brügger, Niels, ed, Web25: Histories from the first 25 years of the World Wide Web (Peter Lang, 2017).

External links[edit]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_World_Wide_Web&oldid=1082977279"