What Is Web

Tim used to be a scientist at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, an organisation that carries out researches on particle physics. Being an organisation that carries out researches that requires a vast amount of time, researches go on with thousands of researchers successively taking over their predecessor’s work.

It was then where discussions started to brew at CERN about whether it was possible to develop a system that can enable researchers to view data and information smoothly. The person who acted to materialise this idea was Tim Berners-Lee who was at that time a Computer Engineer at CERN. First, Tim gathered all the references and data related to the research on one computer. Next, he planned a mechanism to “link” all the documents together and he succeeded. That was what we have been using up till today, the World Wide Web, in other words, the beginning of the Web.

It was rumored that Tim had a hard time coming up with a name for this system for its announcement. One the names considered was “TIM”, the acronym for “The Information Mine” and of course, Tim’s name! He later revealed in his own Web site that he gave up the thought as the name was too self-centered!

Another name considered was “Mesh” which was derived from the concept of the WWW being a “Network of information made up of linked documents”. However, the word “Mesh” can easily be mistaken for “Mess” and was therefore deemed inappropriate by Tim to avoid it being mistaken as a “World Wide Mess”! After careful consideration, Tim replaced the word “Mesh” with “Web” reason being a structure of a network resembled that of a “Spider’s web” and therefore, he named the system “World Wide Web” which represented a “Spider web spreading out to the World”. The word “Web” as in Website that we having been using is a product of Tim’s flash of inspiration.

On 6th August 1991, Tim published the World’s first Website. This is the most commonly recorded birthday of the Web. The most impressive feature of Tim’s publication was the system of linking documents together called the “Hyper Text”. Hyper Text as its name suggests, was self-explanatory. The function of being directed to another Webpage simply by clicking a “link” is almost a matter of fact to us these days. Text that possesses this function is called a “Hyper Text”. This was also Tim’s initiate objective for devising a Website to interlink references and research data of the researchers. Tim named the language used to create Websites by taking the acronym of “HyperText Markup Language”, HTML. Tim really has a remarkable naming sense!

Along with the publication of the Website, Tim also announced a software called the “WWW Client”. This software is the “Web Browser” that is being used to view Websites. The widely used browsers today include browsers such as “Internet Explorer”, “Google Chrome”, “Firefox” and “Safari”, that is used for viewing Websites on iPhones and iPads. Tim announced this “WWW Client” to be free to the world and on top of that, he also announced the mechanism behind the method of creating this software for free. No strings attached! Hence, the Web belonged to no one, everybody was free to use it and that led to its remarkable evolution today.

The Web that can be freely used by anyone presented itself as a big chance in the business world. Targeting this, new Web browsers were being created one after another. For a start, America’s National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) launched a browser called the “Mosaic”. The Mosaic was a big hit with its feature that enabled images to be published.

Following Mosaic, two Web browsers, the Netscape and the Internet Explorer were released around 1995 and these two browser giants rivaled each other for a few years. 1995 was also the year where “Windows 95” was launched and that led to the rapid increase in personal computers possession in households. This year, INTERNET ACADEMY was born.

However, it was not all rainbows and butterflies with the existence of multiple browsers. In the midst of the competition, Web browser companies started to add flashy features and each of them developed their own exclusive rules spurring the outbreak of the “war between the browsers”. This resulted in a major confusion for Web designers and engineers since they had to create Websites following 2 different set of rules for the same Website just to display the same content on the 2 different browsers.

It was then when Tim saw the need to standardise the rules for HTML and established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).