www.netskills.ac.

uk

What is the Web ?

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What is the Web?

The Web " is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet" "The Web is an abstract (imaginary) space of information On the Net, the connections are cables between computers; on the Web, connections are hypertext links The Web made the net useful because people are really interested in information." Tim Berners-Lee on the Web
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=p4NKbJPZq2Q http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=24WqXehCueg

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Web past: beginnings

1930s 1960s 1970s 1982 1984 1988 1989 1990
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Vannevar Bush proposes the Memex hypertext device for microfiche Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson independently propose "hypertext" ARPANET is born Ray Tomlinson (BBN) invents email over ARPANET UCL first international connection to ARPANET Cerf and Kahn invent TCP (later split into TCP/IP) ARPANET adopts TCP/IP - the Internet of TCP/IP internets with 235 hosts Domain Name System (DNS) introduced JANET connects UK universities to Internet First Internet worm affects 6,000 of 60,000 hosts Tim Berners-Lee proposes hypertext system for CERN Tim Berners-Lee writes "WorldWideWeb" (with GUI hypertext browser and editor for NEXT workstation) First Web server (November) nxoc01.cern.ch (later info.cern.ch)

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Web past: take off

1991 1992 1993 CERN releases World Wide Web technology (WWW) Released to CERN (May) then files posted on public FTP (Aug) 26 HTTP servers Public project page in Nov 1992 GUI browsers (including Mosaic) available for all platforms CERN declare WWW technology free to use with no fees The Guardian publishes its first page on Web Over 200 HTTP servers W3 Consortium (W3C) founded & 1st International WWW conference WWW 2nd most popular service on the Internet (behind FTP) AltaVista search engine and Yahoo launch First banner ads appear WWW overtakes FTP as No 1 internet service Amazon and eBay launch "Browser wars" begin between Microsoft and Netscape

1994 1995 1996

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Web past: and (almost) present

1998 1999 2001 2002 2003 2005 2007 Google launches Napster launches Forged Bloomberg financial Web page leads to rise of 31% in shares of small technology company Baltimore train tunnel fire damages backbone fibre optics causing ripple effect across US CodeRed worm infiltrates 1000s of Web servers Blogging takes off DDoS attack knocks out 5 of 13 DNS root servers Nearly half of UK homes connected to Internet SQL slammer worm DDoS attack spreads worldwide in 10 minutes YouTube launches Google is most valuable global brand and most visited Web site A people's history of the internet (Guardian Tech http://bit.ly/4a1zFQ)
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Growth of the Web

Year (Dec) 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
Sites = Number of web servers (one host may have multiple sites by using different domains or port numbers)

# Web Servers 1 10 50 603 10,022 30,500 603,367 1,681,868 3,689,227 9,560,866 25,675,581 36,276,252 35,543,105 45,980,112

1999 2000 2001 2002 2003

http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

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Tim Berners-Lee: A two part dream

" the Web becomes a much more powerful means for collaboration between people not just to browse, but to create "

Web 2.0? Mashups? Blogs? Wikis? Etc

"Collaborations (will) extend to computers " becoming " A Semantic Web " in which " intelligent agents finally materialise "

The true Semantic Web has proved elusive (but recently more realistic?)
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Web present
The academic/scientific web The commercial web
Research centres, universities (early adopters) Business to Consumer (Amazon) Consumer to Consumer (Ebay) Business to Business over open network Blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Twitter Mashups, Open APIs and free(er) access to data (e.g. Guardian datastore)

The social web

The creative web

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Web future?
Barriers for change
(Virtually) no barrier to new devices to connect Low barrier for new applications to run (Increasingly) high barrier to infrastructure changes

A semantic web of sorts?

Simplified meta information systems & smart agents XML, RDFa and microformats? Infrastructure, Platforms, Software/Applications e.g. Amazon WS, Google AppEngine, Google Apps

(The web) as a service (cloud computing) Browser/OS blurring e.g. Chrome OS?
JISC Netskills