It was 13 March 1989 whenTim
Berners-Lee, working at Cern in Geneva, came
up with the concept that became the worldwide web. On that day,
Berners-Lee presented his visionary paper on a simple mechanism for
allowing the particle physics research community to share
documents, based on a simplified form of Standard Generalised
Markup Language (SGML).
In this article:
And so was born HyperText Markup Language (HTML), a language for
describing how to present text and images in an electronic
document, along with a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which allows
users to access documents in a standard way using the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The genius of Berners Lee's idea was that the documents were
somehow intelligent, containing hypertext links that allowed a
researcher to access additional information by following an
embedded link. Users take this for granted now, but without it the
web would simply have become a library of discrete pages, instead
of the dynamic environment that users see today.
Arguably, the most significant development in the last 20 years
has been the web browser standard. Andy Mullholland, global chief
technology officer at Capgemini, says, "The development in browser
technology has changed how we use the web."
The browser is the universal window on all types of text and
multimedia content. Thanks to Java, ActiveX and Ajax, it is now
possible to plug in additional functionality into the browser to
allow it to support new types of content.
Speed is everything
Broadband has driven the popularity of the web. In the early
days people connected to the internet using a dial-up modem. If
they were lucky they achieved access speeds of 56Kbps.
Tasks that users take for granted, such as near instant access
to Hotmail or other webmail systems, took several minutes.
According to Gartner principal research analysts Fernando Elizalde
and Amanda Sabia, "The actual physical connection to the web - the
broadband connection - has been on the rise and at the end of 2008,
20% of all households globally had a broadband connection. This is
on pace to increase to 25% by 2012. In conjunction with the rise of
broadband connections is the speed of the connection. This is
especially important as the content on the web becomes more
complex, moving from text to video."
So what of the
future?
Nelson Mattos, vice-president of engineering for EMEA at Google,
says the web is becoming more global and more mobile. "There are
only about 1.2 billion fixed connections to the internet right
now.
That will increase in the coming years. More and more people
will get access to information globally, regardless of their
location, time zone or the device they use to access the cloud, and
an increasing number of developers and content creators will
contribute to the information base shared via online
applications."
The National Computing Centre predicts that within 10 years the
semantic web will become a reality. The
semantic web intelligently responds to queries and questions
rather than just responding with data files. This could lead to a
possible Big Brother outcry as the web becomes really all
pervasive.
Over the long term, Ted Schadler, vice-president and principal
analyst at Forrester Research, points to some of the work IBM is
doing, which provides a glimpse of where the web may be heading.
IBM's "smarter planet" concept includes intelligent power grids,
buildings, and transportation systems.
"It is essentially the web as a system of intelligent connected
devices rather than web as point-to-point links," says
Schadler.
Internet business
The web has clearly shaped business. Ollie Ross, head of
research at The Corporate IT Forum, says, "It is supporting
real-time working between individuals and distributed teams, and
enabling organisations to truly leverage internal capabilities and
knowledge across continents and time zones." This trend is set to
continue.
For instance, IBM is also working on a project called Blue
Spruce, which takes the web beyond the browser-user interface. The
idea is to create a collaboration platform, where multiple users
can view and edit documents in real-time. It is a bit like web
conferencing but uses a standard web browser, so there is no
additional software required.
With events changing so quickly, it is hard to see where the web
will be in just a few years from now. What is clear is that the web
will be everywhere, accessible by anyone, on any device. Devices
will talk to each other via the web and web searching will be more
intelligent.
Alan Pollard, president of the British Computer Society, says
that within 20 years electronic information storage will become the
norm and printed publishing will become a dying art.