Everybody who uses the internet, knows the word www. Do you know the meaning of this word? World Wide Web is the meaning of this www. Today, all websites which are communicating through the internet is moving through this www. The history of this www runs to 1989. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist introduced this www to the world. His father was also a computer scientist.
After graduating from Oxford University, he was able to become a software engineer at CERN Company, Switzerland. When he was working there, he noticed that other engineers were having difficulty sharing information. So he started to find a solution to solve this problem.
One time, Tim has said like this “there was different information on different computers, but I had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes I had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”.
However, he tried to find a way to share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext. He presented his idea by a document called Information Management; A Proposal. Unfortunately that document was rejected. His boss Mike Sendall, noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover of that document. Actually, www is not a project of CERN. But Mike Sendall allowed Tim to work on that project since 1990. He started his project by a NeXT Computer.
www – More
Tim was able to find three fundamental technologies for the foundation of today’s Web, in October 1990. They are;
HTML: HyperText Markup Language
URI: Uniform Resource Identifier (Addresses that we are using to find each resource on the web)
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
The first web page editor/browser was created by Tim. It is known as WorldWideWeb.app. Along with that, the first web server was also introduced. It was httpd. At the end of 1990, the first Web page was served on the open internet. And in 1991, the people outside of CERN were also invited to join this new Web community. At this time, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.
Therefore, he and his team tried to explain that idea to CERN management to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, for ever. Finally this decision was announced in April 1993. As a result of that, the Web is spreading all over the world. How fast it has grown is that almost 2/5 people around the world were using the Web when the Web celebrated its 25th birthday.
In 1994, Tim moved from CERN to Massachusetts Company and he established World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a community that involved to make open web standards. The early Web community produced some radical ideas that are now spreading far beyond the technology area. They are;
Decentralisation – No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the Web.
Non-discrimination: If any one pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and if any other one pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service also, then both of them can communicate at the same level.
Bottom-up design: It was established in full view of everyone, instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts.
Universality: It is for anyone to be able to publish anything on the Web.
As a result of that, today we can see there is a rise to approach in fields as diverse as information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access), education, and culture (Free Culture). However, in 2009, Sir Tim established the World Wide Web Foundation and he has done a great change in technology world via this www (World Wide Web).