The Evolving World Wide Web

Eakan Gopalakrishnan

MSc Web Technology,

School of Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton
Southampton, Hampshire,
United Kingdom.
eg5g09@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Abstract. Today the web has become an integral part of our life. It has grown
to an extent that we take it for granted and forget that the web had to be
invented. It has grown from being a hypertext system that was unacceptable and
inefficient to many in the beginning to the current almost infinite web of
information mainly because of its simplicity and ease of use. People had to be
convinced about the system in the beginning to make them start using the web.
But now it has become more powerful than ever, with capabilities that it never
had a few years ago like blogging, wikis and social networking. The web has
now become editable there by making the web a really interactive and
collaborative platform. In a short span of around 18 years the web evolved into
something that only a few men had predicted. The purpose of this lecture note
is to take the reader through the evolution that the web has undergone, the past,
present and future of the web.

Keywords: World Wide Web, internet, technology, hypertext, hyperlinks, web

1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Semantic Web

1 Introduction

The evolution of the web can be traced back to the need of information organization.
Information has been available ever since man started research and experiments. But
to organize it all at one place for easy access was a huge problem that several people
had tried to solve. Pioneers like Bush had thought of an information processing
machine way before it came into existence as the personal computer [1]. Engelbart,
through his demo, proved that collaborative work would be exciting and gave the
world a new input device that has become an essential peripheral for browsing and an
inevitable part of the personal computer [2]. Ted Nelson came up with the Project
Xanadu to build a hypertext (a word coined by him) system that had version
management and rights management [3]. He brought out ideas for trans-publishing,
unbroken links and worldwide anarchic publishing. Conklin surveyed various systems
of Hypertext that existed during his time and classified it into different groups [4].
The visionaries had already seen the extent to which the technologies would grow and
how easy it would become to find relevant information from the large pile of
available information. But the WWW by Sir Tim Berners Lee, won over all the other
systems. The invention of easy to use browsers like Mosaic and the search engines
helped the web to be used by ever growing number of people.
In the future the web would be a place where people typed in queries to get their
answers rather than typing in text for information. So far humans have been doing
more of the information processing but in the future, machines would process
information and retrieve answers to the questions that we have. This is what is
expected with the development of the semantic web.

2 The Visionaries and their contributions

As stated in the introduction Vannevar Bush in his essay talks about the growth of
information to an extent that it cannot be put to efficient use. As a solution to his
problem he designed a machine that he saw would come into existence which he
named Memex; which would be a supplement to the human memory and would be
able to store information, could be consulted with very high speed and flexibility.
This was the first ever published article that talked about a concept of compressing
the information available in a library to a small machine. His ideas and concepts were
then used by others like Engelbart in his research to develop the NLS that
demonstrates the first online collaborative work in history using a mouse, bitmapped
screens and hypertext. Engelbart designed user interfaces long before the advent of
personal computers.
Nelson in 1965 wrote about Literary Machines that would let people write, publish
and share in a non linear format which he termed “Hypertext”; by which he meant
people could read through a document in any order by following links; getting down
to the root of information would be easy. Though he has not been very successful in
making his system popular, it had several ideas which were borrowed into the WWW.
Conklin’s survey informally classified hypertext systems that existed at his time
into four broad categories: macro literary systems, problem exploration tools,
browsing systems, general hypertext technology. He surveyed several systems that
existing during his time like Textnet, Personal Information Environment, Issue Based
Information Systems, SYNVIEW, WE, Outline processors, ZOG and Knowledge
Management System, INFO, Hyperties, Symbolic Document Examiner, NoteCards,
Intermedia, Tektronix Neptune, Boxer, Cross Referenced Editing Facility, FileVision,
Guide, Hypercard and PlaneText.
The best known hypertext system of those times was the NoteCards by Xerox
PARC. All the systems mentioned earlier were focussed on non-linear information
access and through some sort of linking system. Thus hyperlinks were the basis of all
the systems though each system had their own type of links. But eventually only one
system spread out like a blaze and let all the others behind.

2.1 The advent of the World Wide Web

Tim Berner’s Lee invented the hypertext system called the World Wide Web in
1990. After presenting the WWW at the Hypertext 1991 conference, he visited
several universities and research labs and clarified the understanding of the WWW.
Then in December 1992 the first web server outside Europe was set up at Stanford
University. Then browsers started being released by different groups and Mosaic
gained popularity. And in April 1993 CERN allowed the WWW to be used freely by
anyone and then was probably the beginning of the widespread use of the WWW.
Dial-up connections came into existence and companies and more and more people
started using the web. Then in 1994, after discussion with several great people the
W3C was formed [5]. The simplicity of this hyperlink system was one of the main
reasons of the wide spread use of the Web, moreover it was free to use by anyone.
This particular era of the web ended with the dot com bubble burst in 2001. It
wasn’t known as Web 1.0 till then but ever since the term Web 2.0 was coined the
web that existed before would be referred to as Web 1.0. This was the era when
people used the web to read and collect information through reading. People to people
interaction was very less, mostly the type of interaction that existed included filling
forms and using chat rooms.

2.2 What is Web 2.0?

A new era of the web started after the burst of the dot-com bubble in the fall of
2001. The concept of Web 2.0 began with a brainstorming session between O’Reilly
and MediaLive International.
Some of the key features of Web 2.0 are user centred design, decentralized
networks, server mounted applications, multiplatform applications, non hierarchical
applications and SaaS. In other words web 2.0 can be viewed as a set of principles
and practices that bring together several sites that demonstrate some or all of those
principles [6].
It can be observed that ever since the beginning of this web 2.0, web applications
weren’t released as newer releases like it was done previously, instead it went through
a process of continuous improvement and continued to be beta forever. Most of the
content available are user generated, built on a simple, basic framework that enables
sharing, reviewing and discussion of issues. Web sites have become user centric.
Software applications on the web are provided as services. This has changed the
whole strategy of e-commerce and advertising online. Nowadays news spread faster
via blogs, Twitter feeds and other social networking sites than the news agency web
sites. There exists recommendation systems that recommend music or products
depending on user usage history or tag based similarity calculation.
But there is still a huge disagreement about what the term Web 2.0 actually means.
According to the founder of the web, the term “Web 2.0” is a jargon that is vague and
misunderstood by many [7]. The web was invented for collaboration and interaction.
Sir Tim Berners Lee says that blogs, wikis, social networking sites etc are just the
progress of the same web that was created years ago. The same standards that created
the previous web are being used by the so called web 2.0.
Fig. 1. Web 2.0 Meme Map

3 The realisation of the Vision

The spread of the WWW was mainly due to the availability of broadband access to
the internet. It became even more used when people connected to the web using their
mobile devices. Today information is accessible from anywhere at any time. The
personal computers have become exactly as Bush described in his paper about
Memex, except for the underlying technology used, the concept is very much the
same. The web has become a system of non linear information storage just like the
human mind. Engelbart’s demonstration can be now seen as the current web, where
people can collaborate and share information and work on the same document at the
same time from geographically different locations. As some of pioneers proposed an
index to the whole set of information, today we have an index to the web, Google.
The collaboration has resulted in the world’s largest free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia
and similarly many other sites where people can refer for information for free and
contribute as they wish. It is possible to link or reference any number of documents in
one hyper text document. Most web pages use the concept of transclusion as put
forward by Nelson. The idea of trails and browsing through history has been
implemented in the Web as of now. Google wave project can demonstrate that in the
best way.
But the web still has issues that have always been open to solve. But the issues and
challenges have been changing gradually with every era of the evolution.

4 Future of the Web: Web 3.0?

The Semantic web was initiated in 1996 when it was realized that although
everything on the web was machine-readable it wasn’t machine understandable [7].
This led to the development of a metadata system to describe the data contained in the
web. Meta data means data about data; that is data describing the Web. Then RDF
came into existence and in 1999 it appeared as a W3C recommendation. Then the
Web Ontology Language became another recommendation from the W3C in 2004.
This semantic web was actually thought about when the information available on
the web had grown to a very large extent. The difficulties in retrieving necessary
information made people think of a solution to this problem. The aim of having a
semantic web is to be able to query the web and get answers to complex logical
queries. Thereby making the machines do all the information processing rather than
humans. Thus the future of the web would be people typing in logical questions and
automated agents finding out the answers rather than just retrieving list of sites
containing keywords which is how it is now.
But the semantic web has serious issues with privacy and security which are being
looked into currently.
Thus the future of the web could be seen as the existing web 2.0 with a machine
understandable set of information, which would make information retrieval easier
than ever.

References

1. Bush, V.: As We May Think: The Atlantic Monthly. July 1945

2. Engelbart, D.C.: AUGMENTING HUMAN INTELLECT: A Conceptual Framework, SRI
Summary report, October 1962, http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
3. Nelson, T.: Project Xanadu, http://xanadu.com/
4. Conklin, J: A survey of Hypertext, ACM’s Hypertext on Hypertext Hypercard stack by
paolo petta, April 1995
5. W3C: How it all started, http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/w3c10-HowItAllStarted/?n=1
6. O’ Reilly, What is web 2.0, http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
7. Developer Works: Interview with Sir Tim Berners Lee,
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html
7. Wilson, M., Matthews, B.: The Semantic Web: Prospects and Challenges, downloaded on
5th December, IEEE Explore.
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