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Biography
Redirect|WWWRedirect|The Web||Web (disambiguation)Distinguish2|the Internet Infobox Product|title = World Wide Web|caption = The Web's historic logo designed by Robert Cailliau |inventor = Tim Berners-Lee |launch year = 1991|company = CERN |available = Worldwidepp-move-indefThe World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3 ,cite web|url= http://www.w3.org/|title=World Wide Web Consortium|quote=The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)... and commonly known as the Web ) is a information system|system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet . With a web browser , one can view web page s that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia , and Web navigation|navigate between them via hyperlink s.
Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems like ENQUIRE , British people|British engineer and computer science|computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee|Sir Tim Berners-Lee , now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.cite news | title = Tim Berners Lee& nbsp;— Time 100 People of the Century | url = http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,990627,00.html | publisher = Time Magazine | accessdate = 17 May 2010 | quote = He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free. . | first=Joshua | last=Quittner | date=March 29, 1999 At CERN , a European research organization near Geneva situated on Swiss and French soil, http://www.lepoint.fr/technologie/le-web-a-ete-invente-en-france-31-01-2012-1425943_58.php Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "... to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will","cite web|url= http://w3.org/Proposal.html |title=WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a hypertexts Project |first1=Tim |last1=Berners-Lee |authorlink1=Tim Berners-Lee |first2=Robert |last2=Cailliau |authorlink2=Robert Cailliau|date=November 12, 1990 |accessdate=July 27, 2009 and they publicly introduced the project in December.cite web|author=Berners-Lee, Tim|title=Pre-W3C Web and Internet Background|url= http://w3.org/2004/Talks/w3c10-HowItAllStarted/? n=15|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 21, 2009
History
Main|History of the World Wide WebIn the May 1970 issue of Popular Science magazine Arthur C. Clarke was reported to have predicted that satellites would one day "bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips" using a console that would combine the functionality of the Xerox, telephone, television and a small computer, allowing data transfer and video conferencing around the globe.Cite journal |last=von Braun |first=Wernher|url= http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer? id=8QAAAAAAMBAJ& pg=66& query=a+c+clarke |date = May 1970|title=TV Broadcast Satellite |magazine=Popular Science |accessdate=January 12, 2011 |pages=65–66
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that referenced ENQUIRE , a database and software project he had built in 1980, and described a more elaborate information management system.cite web |last=Berners-Lee |first=Tim |url= http://w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html |month=March |year=1989 |title=Information Management: A Proposal |publisher=W3C |accessdate=July 27, 2009
With help from Robert Cailliau , he published a more formal proposal (on November 12, 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by " Web browser|browsers " using a client–server architecture . 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, blog s, Web 2.0 and RSS / Atom (standard)|Atom .cite web|url= http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html|title=Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web browser|quote=With recent phenomena like blogs and wikis, the web is beginning to develop the kind of collaborative nature that its inventor envisaged from the start.
The proposal was modeled after the Dynatext SGML reader 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 technically advanced and 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.
A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser , WorldWideWeb , in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:cite web|url= http://w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb |title=Tim Berners-Lee: client |publisher=W3.org |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 the WorldWideWeb|first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,cite web|url= http://w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html |title=First Web pages |publisher=W3.org |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 which described the project itself. On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup .cite web|url= http://groups.google.com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c |title=Short summary of the World Wide Web project |publisher=Groups.google.com |date=August 6, 1991 |accessdate=July 27, 2009 This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The first photo on the web was uploaded by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes .
Quote box|title=Web as a "Side Effect" of the 40 years of Particle Physics Experiments. |It happened many times during history of science that the most impressive results of large scale scientific efforts appeared far away from the main directions of those efforts ... After the World War 2 the nuclear centers of almost all developed countries became the places with the highest concentration of talented scientists. For about four decades many of them were invited to the international CERN's Laboratories. So specific kind of the CERN's intellectual "entire culture" (as you called it) was constantly growing from one generation of the scientists and engineers to another. When the concentration of the human talents per square foot of the CERN's Labs reached the critical mass, it caused an intellectual explosion
The Web,& nbsp;– crucial point of human's history, was born... Nothing could be compared to it ... We cant imagine yet the real scale of the recent shake, because there has not been so fast growing multi-dimension social-economic processes in human history... http://www.netvalley.com/cgi-bin/intval/net_history.pl? chapter=2 Roads and Crossroads of Internet History by Gregory Gromov The first server outside Europe was set up at SLAC to host the SPIRES|SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992,cite web|url= http://w3.org/2005/01/timelines/timeline-2500x998.png|title=W3C timeline|accessdate=March 30, 2010 whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.cite web|url= http://slac.stanford.edu/spires/about/|title=About SPIRES|accessdate=March 30, 2010cite web|url= http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml|title=The Early World Wide Web at SLAC This is supported by a W3C document entitled A Little History of the World Wide Web .cite web|url= http://www.w3.org/History.html|title=A Little History of the World Wide Web
The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson 's Project Xanadu , and Douglas Engelbart 's NLS (computer system)|oN-Line System (NLS). 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 ". Citation needed|date=August 2009 Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor|Weaving The Web , he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies: # a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, the Universal Document Identifier (UDI), later known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); # the publishing language Hypertext Markup Language|HyperText Markup Language (HTML); # the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).cite web|title=Inventor of the Week Archive: The World Wide Web|url= http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/berners-lee.html|publisher= Massachusetts Institute of Technology : MIT School of Engineering|accessdate=July 23, 2009
The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then available. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made 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. On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.cite web|url= http://tenyears-www.web.cern.ch/tenyears-www/Welcome.html |title=Ten Years Public Domain for the Original Web Software |publisher=Tenyears-www.web.cern.ch |date=April 30, 2003 |accessdate=July 27, 2009 Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher (protocol)|Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW for Unix and the X Windowing System . Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introductioncite web|url= http://livinginternet.com/w/wi_mosaic.htm |title=Mosaic Web Browser History& nbsp;— NCSA, Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina |publisher=Livinginternet.com |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 of the Mosaic (web browser)|Mosaic web browsercite web|url= http://totic.org/nscp/demodoc/demo.html |title=NCSA Mosaic& nbsp;— September 10, 1993 Demo |publisher=Totic.org |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen . Funding for Mosaic came from the U.S. High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 , one of Al Gore and information technology|several computing developments initiated by U.S. Senator Al Gore .cite web|url= http://cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/faculty.lecture/innovation/gore.html |title=Vice President Al Gore's ENIAC Anniversary Speech |publisher=Cs.washington.edu |date=February 14, 1996 |accessdate=July 27, 2009 Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages and the Web's popularity was less than older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher (protocol)|Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994. 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 DG InfSo; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. By the end of 1994, while the total number of websites was still minute compared to present standards, quite a number of List of websites founded before 1995|notable websites were already active, many of which are the precursors or inspiration for today's most popular services.
Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created around the world, adding international standards for domain name s and HTML . Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of web standards (such as the markup language s in which web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web . 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 popularizing use of the Internet.cite web|url= http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Internet |title=Internet legal definition of Internet |publisher=Free Online Law Dictionary |date=July 15, 2009 |work=West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2 |accessdate=November 25, 2008 Although the two terms are sometimes conflation|conflated in popular use, World Wide Web is not synonym ous with Internet .cite web|url= http://techterms.com/definition/www |title=WWW (World Wide Web) Definition |publisher=TechTerms |accessdate= february 19 2010 The Web is a collection of documents and both client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP .
Function
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks . In contrast, the Web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessed by web browsers from web servers . In short, the Web can be thought of as an application software|application "running" on the Internet.cite web|title=The W3C Technology Stack|url= http://www.w3.org/Consortium/technology|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 21, 2009
Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the Uniform Resource Locator|URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it. As an example, consider accessing a page with the URL http://example.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web .
First, the browser resolves the server-name portion of the URL ( example.org ) into an IP address|Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed database known as the Domain Name System (DNS); this lookup returns an IP address such as 208.80.152.2 . The browser then requests the resource by sending an Hypertext Transfer Protocol|HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that particular address. It makes the request to a particular application port in the underlying Internet Protocol Suite so that the computer receiving the request can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing such as e-mail delivery; the HTTP protocol normally uses List of TCP and UDP port numbers|port 80 . The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as the two lines of text GET /wiki/World_Wide_Web HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org
The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfill the request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success, which can be as simple as HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 followed by the content of the requested page. The Hypertext Markup Language for a basic web page looks like
Example.org — The World Wide Web
The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known ...
The web browser parsing|parses the HTML, interpreting the markup (, for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words in order to draw the text on the screen.
Many web pages use HTML to reference the URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, JavaScript|scripts that affect page behavior, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser will make additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media type s. As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively Layout engine|renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources.
Linking
Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like Example.org, a free encyclopedia Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase , which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990.
The hyperlink structure of the WWW is described by the webgraph : the nodes of the webgraph correspond to the web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlink s.
Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called dead link s. The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive web sites. The Internet Archive , active since 1996, is one of the best-known efforts.
Dynamic updates of web pages
Main|Ajax (programming) JavaScript is a Scripting programming language|scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich , then of Netscape , for use within web pages.cite web|author=Hamilton, Naomi|title=The A-Z of Programming Languages: JavaScript|url= http://computerworld.com.au/article/255293/-z_programming_languages_javascript|date=July 31, 2008|work=Computerworld|publisher=IDG|accessdate=May 12, 2009 The standardized version is ECMAScript . To overcome some of the limitations of the page-by-page model described above, some web applications also use Ajax (programming)|Ajax ( Asynchronous I/O|asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). JavaScript is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse-clicks or based on lapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response. Thus, the server must provide only limited, incremental information. Since multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, users can interact with a page even while data is being retrieved. Some web applications regularly polling (computer science)|poll the server to ask whether new information is available.cite web |url= http://buntin.org/2008/sep/23/jquery-polling-plugin/ |title=jQuery Polling plugin |date=23 September 2008 |last=Buntin |first=Seth |accessdate=2009-08-22
WWW prefix
Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www , in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server , and news or nntp for a USENET news server . These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of 'www' as a subdomain name is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch,cite web|url= http://w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html |title=Frequently asked questions by the Press | first = Tim | last = Berners-Lee |publisher=W3C |date= | accessdate=July 27, 2009 and many web sites exist without it. Many established websites still use 'www', or they invent other subdomain names such as 'www2', 'secure', etc. Many such web servers are set up such that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.
The use of a subdomain name is useful for Load balancing (computing)|load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently, only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root.
When a user submits an incomplete domain name to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering 'not a typo|microsoft' may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org . This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox , when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx (web browser)|Lynx .cite web |url= http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php? f=9& t=10980 |title=automatically adding www._ .com |publisher=mozillaZine |date=May 16, 2003 |accessdate=May 27, 2009 It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.cite web |url= http://techdirt.com/articles/20080626/0203581527.shtml |title=Microsoft Patents Adding 'www.' And '.com' To Text |publisher=Techdirt |last=Masnick |first=Mike |date=July 7, 2008 |accessdate=May 27, 2009
In English, Pronunciation of "www"| www is pronounced by individually pronouncing the name of characters ( double-u double-u double-u ) or by saying the phrase "triple double-u". Although some technical users pronounce it dub-dub-dub , this is not widespread. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent|The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," with Stephen Fry later pronouncing it in his "Podgrammes" series of podcasts as "wuh wuh wuh." In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wŕn wéi wang (lang|zh| wikt:???|??? ), which satisfies www and literally means "myriad dimensional net",cite web|url= http://us.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php? page=translate& trst=0& trqs=World+Wide+Web& trlang=& wddmtm=0 |title=MDBG Chinese-English dictionary& nbsp;— Translate |accessdate=July 27, 2009 a translation that very appropriately reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens.cite web|url= http://w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html |title=Frequently asked questions by the Press& nbsp;— Tim BL |publisher=W3.org |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009
Use of the www prefix is declining as Web 2.0 web application s seek to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable.cite news|url= http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6421/is_4_92/ai_n56479358/|title=It's not your grandfather's Internet | work=Strategic Finance | year=2010 As the mobile web grows in popularity, services like Google Mail|Gmail .com, MySpace .com, Facebook .com and Twitter .com are most often discussed without adding the www to the domain (or the .com)
Specifiers: http and https
The scheme specifiers ( http:// or https:// ) in Uniform Resource Identifier|URIs refer to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and to HTTP Secure , respectively, and so define the communication protocol to be used for the request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web; the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when confidential information such as passwords or banking information are to be exchanged over the public Internet. Web browsers usually prepend the scheme to URLs too, if omitted.
Privacy
Cleanup|section|date=June 2011POV-check|section|section|date=June 2011It is possible that average computer users who use the World Wide Web mainly for things like entertainment may have surrendered their right to privacy in exchange for using a number of services available on the World Wide Web.Cite book |last1=Abelson |first1=Hal |last2=Ledeen |first2=Ken |last3=Lewis |first3=Harry Lewis |title=Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion |url= http://bitsbook.com/|date=April 14, 2008|isbn=0-13-713559-9 |chapter=1–2 |publisher=Addison Wesley |accessdate=November 6, 2008Vague|date=June 2011 For example: more than half a billion people worldwide have used a social network service ,cite press release|title=Social Networking Explodes Worldwide as Sites Increase their Focus on Cultural Relevance|url= http://comscore.com/press/release.asp? press=2396 |publisher=comScore |date=August 12, 2008 |accessdate=November 9, 2008 and of the generations of people within the United States who have had access to the internet from a young age, half have some form of Social Networking presence.cite web |last1=Lenhart |first1=Amanda |last2=Madden |first2=Mary |title=Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks |url= http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Privacy_SNS_Report_Final.pdf |archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20080306031923/ http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Privacy_SNS_Report_Final.pdf |archivedate=2008-03-06 |date=April 18, 2007 |format=PDF |publisher=Pew Internet & American Life Project |accessdate=November 9, 2008 and are part of a generational shift that could be changing norms.cite video |people=Schmidt, Eric (Google) |date=October 20, 2008 |title=Eric Schmidt at Bloomberg on the Future of Technology |url= http://youtube.com/watch? v=rD_x9LW5QRg |publisher=YouTube |accessdate=November 9, 2008 |time=16:30Cite news |author=Nussbaum, Emily |title=Say Everything |url= http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/ |date=February 12, 2007 |work=New York |publisher=New York Media |accessdate=November 9, 2008Elucidate|date=June 2011 The social network Facebook progressed from U.S. college students to a 70% non-U.S. audience, but in 2009 estimated that only 20% of its members use privacy settings.Cite news|author=Stone, Brad|title=Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast? |url= http://nytimes.com/2009/03/29/technology/internet/29face.html? pagewanted=all |date=March 28, 2009 |newspaper=The New York Times and Cite news |author=Lee Byron (Facebook) |title=The Road to 200 Million |url= http://nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/03/29/business/29face.graf01.ready.html|newspaper=The New York Times |date=March 28, 2009 |accessdate=April 2, 2009 In 2010 (six years after co-founding the company), Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use".Cite news|author=Zuckerberg, Mark|title=From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings|url= http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052303828.html|work=The Washington Post|date=May 24, 2010|accessdate=May 24, 2010
Privacy representatives from 60 countries have resolved to ask for laws to complement industry self-regulation, for education for children and other minors who use the Web, and for default protections for users of social networks.cite press release|title=Protecting privacy in a borderless world|url= http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/ http://www.privacyconference2008.org/pdf/press_final_en.pdf|format=PDF|date=October 17, 2008|publisher=30th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, via Internet Archive|accessdate=November 8, 2008 They also believe data protection for personally identifiable information benefits business more than the sale of that information. Users can opt-in to features in browsers to clear their personal histories locally and block some HTTP cookie|cookies and advertising network scite web|author=Cooper, Alissa|title=Browser Privacy Features: A Work In Progress|url= http://www.cdt.org/privacy/20081022_browser_priv.pdf|format=PDF|publisher=Center for Democracy and Technology|date=October 2008|accessdate=November 8, 2008 but they are still tracked in websites' server log s, and in particular web beacons .cite web|author=Joshua Gomez, Travis Pinnick, and Ashkan Soltani|title=KnowPrivacy|pages=8–9|date=June 1, 2009|url= http://www.knowprivacy.org/report/KnowPrivacy_Final_Report.pdf|format=PDF|publisher=University of California, Berkeley, School of Information|accessdate=June 2, 2009 Berners-Lee and colleagues see hope in accountability and appropriate use achieved by extending the Web's architecture to policy awareness, perhaps with audit logging, reasoners and appliances.cite web|author=Daniel J. Weitzner, Harold Abelson, Tim Berners-Lee, Joan Feigenbaum, James Hendler, Gerald Jay Sussman|title=Information Accountability|id=hdl|1721.1/37600|date=June 13, 2007|publisher=MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
In exchange for providing free content, vendors hire advertisers who spy on Web users and base their business model on tracking them.Cite news|author=Angwin, Julia|title=The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets |url= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703940904575395073512989404.html|date=July 30, 2010|publisher=Dow Jones|work=The Wall Street Journal|accessdate=August 3, 2010 Since 2009, they buy and sell consumer data on exchanges (lacking a few details that could make it possible to de-anonymize, or identify an individual).Cite news|author=Steel, Emily and Angwin, Julia|title=On the Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only|url= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703294904575385532109190198.html|date=August 4, 2010|publisher=Dow Jones|work=The Wall Street Journal|accessdate=August 3, 2010 Hundreds of millions of times per day, Lotame Solutions captures what users are typing in real time, and sends that text to OpenAmplify who then tries to determine, to quote a writer at The Wall Street Journal , "what topics are being discussed, how the author feels about those topics, and what the person is going to do about them".Cite news|author=Angwin, Julia and Valentino-DeVries, Jennifer|title=Analyzing What You Have Typed|url= http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/30/analyzing-what-you-have-typed/|date=July 30, 2010|publisher=Dow Jones|work=The Wall Street Journal|accessdate=August 3, 2010Cite news|author=Valentino-Devries, Jennifer|title=What They Know About You|url= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703999304575399041849931612.html|date=July 31, 2010|publisher=Dow Jones|work=The Wall Street Journal|accessdate=August 3, 2010
Microsoft backed away in 2008 from its plans for strong privacy features in Internet Explorer,Cite news|author=Wingfield, Nick|title=Microsoft Quashed Effort to Boost Online Privacy|url= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383530439838568.html|date=August 2, 2010|publisher=Dow Jones|work=The Wall Street Journal|accessdate=August 3, 2010 leaving its users (50% of the world's Web users) open to advertisers who may make assumptions about them based on only one click when they visit a website.Cite news|author=Steel, Emily and Angwin, Julia|title=One Smart Cookie|url= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704017904575409021400239454.html|date=August 4, 2010|publisher=Dow Jones|work=The Wall Street Journal|accessdate=August 3, 2010 Among services paid for by advertising, Yahoo! could collect the most data about users of commercial websites, about 2,500 bits of information per month about each typical user of its site and its affiliated advertising network sites. Yahoo& #33; was followed by MySpace with about half that potential and then by AOL – TimeWarner , Google , Facebook, Microsoft, and eBay .Cite news|author=Story, Louise and comScore|title=They Know More Than You Think|url= http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/03/10/technology/20080310_PRIVACY_GRAPHIC.html|format=JPEG|date=March 10, 2008 | work=The New York Times in Cite news|author=Story, Louise|title=To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You|url= http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/technology/10privacy.html|work=The New York Times|publisher=The New York Times Company|date=March 10, 2008|accessdate=March 9, 2008
Security
The Web has become criminals' preferred pathway for spreading malware . Cybercrime carried out on the Web can include identity theft , fraud , espionage and intelligence gathering . Web-based vulnerability (computing)|vulnerabilities now outnumber traditional computer security concerns,cite web|author=Christey, Steve and Martin, Robert A.|title=Vulnerability Type Distributions in CVE (version 1.1)|url= http://cwe.mitre.org/documents/vuln-trends/index.html|date=May 22, 2007|publisher= MITRE Corporation |accessdate=June 7, 2008Cite journal|title=Symantec Internet Security Threat Report: Trends for July–December 2007 (Executive Summary)|publisher=Symantec Corp.|volume=XIII|pages=1–2|date=April 2008|url= http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/white_papers/b-whitepaper_exec_summary_internet_security_threat_report_xiii_04-2008.en-us.pdf|format=PDF|accessdate=May 11, 2008 and as measured by Google , about one in ten web pages may contain malicious code.Cite news|title=Google searches web's dark side|url= http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6645895.stm|date=May 11, 2007|publisher=BBC News|accessdate=April 26, 2008 Most Web-based attack (computing)|attacks take place on legitimate websites, and most, as measured by Sophos , are hosted in the United States, China and Russia.cite web|title=Security Threat Report|url= http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/marketing_material/sophos-threat-report-Q108.pdf|format=PDF|date=Q1 2008|publisher=Sophos|accessdate=April 24, 2008 The most common of all malware Threat (computer)|threats is SQL injection attacks against websites.cite web|title=Security threat report|url= http://www.sophos.com/sophos/docs/eng/papers/sophos-security-report-jul08-srna.pdf|format=PDF|date=July 2008|publisher=Sophos|accessdate=August 24, 2008 Through HTML and URIs the Web was vulnerable to attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS) that came with the introduction of JavaScriptCite book|author=Fogie, Seth, Jeremiah Grossman, Robert Hansen, and Anton Rager|title=Cross Site Scripting Attacks: XSS Exploits and Defense|pages=68–69, 127|publisher=Syngress, Elsevier Science & Technology|url= http://www.syngress.com/book_catalog//SAMPLE_1597491543.pdf|format=PDF|year=2007|isbn=1597491543|accessdate=June 6, 2008Dead link|date=September 2010 and were exacerbated to some degree by Web 2.0 and Ajax web design that favors the use of scripts.cite web|author=O'Reilly, Tim|title=What Is Web 2.0|url= http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html|pages=4–5|date=September 30, 2005|publisher=O'Reilly Media|accessdate=June 4, 2008 and AJAX web applications can introduce security vulnerabilities like "client-side security controls, increased attack surfaces, and new possibilities for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)", in Cite journal|author=Ritchie, Paul|title=The security risks of AJAX/web 2.0 applications|url= http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/research/Sep07_Ajax.pdf|archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20080625065122/ http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/research/Sep07_Ajax.pdf|archivedate=2008-06-25|format=PDF|date=March 2007|journal=Infosecurity|publisher=Elsevier|accessdate=June 6, 2008 which cites Cite news|author=Hayre, Jaswinder S. and Kelath, Jayasankar|title=Ajax Security Basics|url= http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1868|publisher=SecurityFocus|date=June 22, 2006|accessdate=June 6, 2008 Today by one estimate, 70% of all websites are open to XSS attacks on their users.Cite news|author=Berinato, Scott|title=Software Vulnerability Disclosure: The Chilling Effect|url= http://www.csoonline.com/article/221113|archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20080418072230/ http://www.csoonline.com/article/221113|archivedate=2008-04-18|work=CSO|page=7|publisher=CXO Media|date=January 1, 2007|accessdate=June 7, 2008
Proposed solutions vary to extremes. Large security vendors like McAfee already design governance and compliance suites to meet post-9/11 regulations,Cite news|author=Prince, Brian|title=McAfee Governance, Risk and Compliance Business Unit|url= http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/McAfee-Governance-Risk-and-Compliance-Business-Unit/|work=eWEEK|publisher=Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings|date=April 9, 2008|accessdate=April 25, 2008 and some, like Finjan have recommended active real-time inspection of code and all content regardless of its source.Cite news|author=Ben-Itzhak, Yuval|title=Infosecurity 2008 – New defence strategy in battle against e-crime|url= http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/04/18/230345/infosecurity-2008-new-defence-strategy-in-battle-against.htm|work=ComputerWeekly|publisher=Reed Business Information|date=April 18, 2008|accessdate=April 20, 2008 Some have argued that for enterprise to see security as a business opportunity rather than a cost center,Cite news|author=Preston, Rob|title=Down To Business: It's Past Time To Elevate The Infosec Conversation|url= http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/client/showArticle.jhtml? articleID=207100989|work=InformationWeek|publisher=United Business Media|date=April 12, 2008|accessdate=April 25, 2008 "ubiquitous, always-on digital rights management" enforced in the infrastructure by a handful of organizations must replace the hundreds of companies that today secure data and networks.Cite news|author=Claburn, Thomas|title=RSA's Coviello Predicts Security Consolidation|url= http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/showArticle.jhtml? articleID=197003826|work=InformationWeek|publisher=United Business Media|date=February 6, 2007|accessdate=April 25, 2008 Jonathan Zittrain has said users sharing responsibility for computing safety is far preferable to locking down the Internet.Cite news|first=Carolyn|last= Duffy Marsan|title= How the iPhone is killing the 'Net|url= http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/040908-zittrain.html|work= Network World|publisher= IDG|date= April 9, 2008|accessdate= April 17, 2008
Standards
Main|Web standards Many formal standards and other technical specifications and software define the operation of different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information exchange. Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other organizations.
Usually, when web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as foundational:
Recommendations for markup languages , especially HTML and XHTML , from the W3C. These define the structure and interpretation of hypertext documents.
Recommendations for style sheet (web development)|stylesheets , especially Cascading Style Sheets|CSS , from the W3C.
Standards for ECMAScript (usually in the form of JavaScript ), from Ecma International .
Recommendations for the Document Object Model , from W3C.
Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:
Uniform Resource Identifier ( Uniform Resource Identifier|URI ), which is a universal system for referencing resources on the Internet, such as hypertext documents and images. URIs, often called URLs, are defined by the IETF's RFC 3986 / STD 66: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax , as well as its predecessors and numerous URI scheme -defining Request For Comments|RFCs ;
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) , especially as defined by RFC 2616: HTTP/1.1 and RFC 2617: HTTP Authentication , which specify how the browser and server authenticate each other.
Accessibility
Main|Web accessibility Access to the Web is for everyone regardless of disability—including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological. Accessibility features also help others with temporary disabilities like a broken arm or the aging population as their abilities change.cite web|title=Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)|url= http://www.w3.org/WAI/l|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 7, 2009Dead link|date=September 2010 The Web is used for receiving information as well as providing information and interacting with society, making it essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.cite web|title=Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization: Overview|url= http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/Overview|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 7, 2009Dead link|date=September 2010 Tim Berners-Lee once noted, "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Many countries regulate web accessibility as a requirement for websites.cite web|title=Legal and Policy Factors in Developing a Web Accessibility Business Case for Your Organization|url= http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/pol|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 7, 2009 International cooperation in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative led to simple guidelines that web content authors as well as software developers can use to make the Web accessible to persons who may or may not be using assistive technology .cite web|title=Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview|url= http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/wcag.php|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 7, 2009
Internationalization
The W3C Internationalization and localization|Internationalization Activity assures that web technology will work in all languages, scripts, and cultures.cite web|title=Internationalization (I18n) Activity|url= http://www.w3.org/International/|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 10, 2009 Beginning in 2004 or 2005, Unicode gained ground and eventually in December 2007 surpassed both ASCII and Western European as the Web's most frequently used character encoding .Cite news|author=Davis, Mark|title=Moving to Unicode 5.1|url= http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/moving-to-unicode-51.html|date=April 5, 2008|publisher=Google|accessdate=April 10, 2009 Originally RFC 3986 allowed resources to be identified by URI in a subset of US-ASCII. RFC 3987 allows more characters—any character in the Universal Character Set —and now a resource can be identified by Internationalized Resource Identifier|IRI in any language.cite press release|title=World Wide Web Consortium Supports the IETF URI Standard and IRI Proposed Standard|url= http://www.w3.org/2004/11/uri-iri-pressrelease.html|date=January 26, 2005|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 10, 2009
Statistics
Between 2005 and 2010, the number of Web users doubled, and was expected to surpass two billion in 2010.cite news|url= http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/19/us-telecoms-internet-idUSTRE69I24720101019 |title=Internet users to exceed 2 billion ... |publisher=Reuters |date=October 19, 2010 |accessdate=Feb 9, 2011 |first=Jonathan |last=Lynn Early studies in 1998 and 1999 estimating the size of the web using capture/recapture methods showed that the much of the web was not indexed by search engines and the web was much larger than expected S. Lawrence, C.L. Giles, "Searching the World Wide Web," Science, 280(5360), 98-100, 1998.,S. Lawrence, C.L. Giles, "Accessibility of Information on the Web," Nature, 400, 107-109, 1999.. According to a 2001 study, there were a massive number, over 550 billion, of documents on the Web, mostly in the invisible Web, or Deep Web .cite web|url= http://www.brightplanet.com/resources/details/deepweb.html|archiveurl= http://web.archive.org/web/20080404044203/ http://www.brightplanet.com/resources/details/deepweb.html|archivedate=2008-04-04 |title=The 'Deep' Web: Surfacing Hidden Value |publisher=Brightplanet.com |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 A 2002 survey of 2,024 million Web pagescite web|url= http://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html |title=Distribution of languages on the Internet |publisher=Netz-tipp.de |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 determined that by far the most Web content was in English: 56.4%; next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent study, which used Web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web, determined that there were over 11.5 billion Web pages in the Surface Web|publicly indexable Web as of the end of January 2005.cite web|author=Alessio Signorini |url= http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/ |title=Indexable Web Size |publisher=Cs.uiowa.edu |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009As of|2009|3, the indexable web contains at least 25.21 billion pages.cite web|url= http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ |title=The size of the World Wide Web |publisher=Worldwidewebsize.com |date= |accessdate=July 27, 2009 On July 25, 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs.cite web|url= http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html |title=We knew the web was big... |accessdate= |last=Alpert |first=Jesse |coauthors=Hajaj, Nissan |date=July 25, 2008 |work=The Official Google Blog |publisher=As of|2009|5, over 109.5 million domains operated.cite web|title=Domain Counts & Internet Statistics|url= http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/|publisher=Name Intelligence|accessdate=May 17, 2009failed verification|date=November 2011 Of these 74% were commercial or other sites operating in the .com generic top-level domain .
Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based either on the number of page view s or on associated server ' Hit (internet)|hits ' (file requests) that it receives.
Speed issues
Frustration over Network congestion|congestion issues in the Internet infrastructure and the high Latency (engineering)|latency that results in slow browsing has led to a pejorative name for the World Wide Web: the World Wide Wait .cite web|title=World Wide Wait|url= http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/defineterm.jhtml? term=world+wide+wait|work=TechEncyclopedia|publisher=United Business Media|accessdate=April 10, 2009 Speeding up the Internet is an ongoing discussion over the use of peering and Quality of service|QoS technologies. Other solutions to reduce the congestion can be found at W3C .cite web|author=Khare, Rohit and Jacobs, Ian|title=W3C Recommendations Reduce 'World Wide Wait'|url= http://www.w3.org/Protocols/NL-PerfNote.html|year=1999|publisher=World Wide Web Consortium|accessdate=April 10, 2009 Guideline s for Web response times are:cite book|author=Nielsen, Jakob (from Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991)|title=Usability Engineering: Response Times: The Three Important Limits|chapter=5|url= http://www.useit.com/papers/responsetime.html|year=1994|publisher=Morgan Kaufmann|accessdate=April 10, 2009
0.1 second (one tenth of a second). Ideal response time. The user does not sense any interruption.
1 second. Highest acceptable response time. Download times above 1 second interrupt the user experience.
10 seconds. Unacceptable response time. The user experience is interrupted and the user is likely to leave the site or system.
Caching
If a user revisits a Web page after only a short interval, the page data may not need to be re-obtained from the source Web server. Almost all web browsers browser cache|cache recently obtained data, usually on the local hard drive. HTTP requests sent by a browser will usually ask only for data that has changed since the last download. If the locally cached data are still current, it will be reused. Caching helps reduce the amount of Web traffic on the Internet. The decision about expiration is made independently for each downloaded file, whether image, Cascading Style Sheets|stylesheet , JavaScript , HTML, or whatever other content the site may provide. Thus even on sites with highly dynamic content, many of the basic resources need to be refreshed only occasionally. Web site designers find it worthwhile to collate resources such as CSS data and JavaScript into a few site-wide files so that they can be cached efficiently. This helps reduce page download times and lowers demands on the Web server.
There are other components of the Internet that can cache Web content. Corporate and academic Firewall (networking)|firewalls often cache Web resources requested by one user for the benefit of all. (See also Web proxy#Caching proxy servers|Caching proxy server .) Some search engines also store cached content from websites. Apart from the facilities built into Web servers that can determine when files have been updated and so need to be re-sent, designers of dynamically generated Web pages can control the HTTP headers sent back to requesting users, so that transient or sensitive pages are not cached. Online banking|Internet banking and news sites frequently use this facility. Data requested with an Hypertext Transfer Protocol|HTTP 'GET' is likely to be cached if other conditions are met; data obtained in response to a 'POST' is assumed to depend on the data that was POSTed and so is not cached.
See also
Portal|Internet
Electronic publishing
Lists of websites
Prestel
Streaming media
Web 1.0
Webgraph
References
Reflist|colwidth=30em
Further reading
Niels Brügger, ed. Web History (2010) 362 pages; Historical perspective on the World Wide Web, including issues of culture, content, and preservation.
Cite journal| author=Fielding, R.; Gettys, J.; Mogul, J.; Frystyk, H.; Masinter, L.; Leach, P.; Berners-Lee, T. | title=Hypertext Transfer Protocol& nbsp;— HTTP/1.1 | publisher=Information Sciences Institute |date = June 1999| version=Request For Comments 2616 | url=ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2616.txt
Cite journal| author=Berners-Lee, Tim; Bray, Tim; Connolly, Dan; Cotton, Paul; Fielding, Roy; Jeckle, Mario; Lilley, Chris; Mendelsohn, Noah; Orchard, David; Walsh, Norman; Williams, Stuart | title=Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One | publisher=W3C | date=December 15, 2004 | version=Version 20041215 | url= http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
cite web| author=Skau, H.O. | title=The World Wide Web and Health Information | publisher= | year= March 1990 | work=New Devices | url= http://newdevices.com/publicaciones/www/ | accessdate=1989
External links
wikibooks|Nets, Webs and the Information Infrastructure
http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/ Early archive of the first Web site
http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/ Internet Statistics: Growth and Usage of the Web and the Internet
http://www.livinginternet.com/w/w.htm Living Internet A comprehensive history of the Internet, including the World Wide Web.
dmoz|Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development|Web Design and Development
http://www.w3.org/ World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/ World Wide Web Size Daily estimated size of the World Wide Web.
http://cle.ens-lyon.fr/40528325/0/fiche_ pagelibre/ Antonio A. Casilli, Some Elements for a Sociology of Online Interactions
http://web-graph.org The Erdos Webgraph Server offers weekly updated graph representation of a constantly increasing fraction of the WWW.