This week we celebrate the birthday of one of the most world changing inventions of the past 100 years: The Web. It is the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee. The web re-imagined the internet as a place where documents could be interlinked and be stored anywhere. Thus the web was born as the most powerful platform application that has been built on the internet. What fuels this application? Web Development.
Importance of Web Development
Firstly, without web development, the blogging revolution would never have occurred. Facebook would be impossible. Google would just be an odd word used by preschoolers. The web promoted an unstoppable wave of innovation. This allowed people a chance to get published through platforms like WordPress, Youtube, and Flickr.
Furthermore, corporations have been built on the backs of the Web. Yet, Tim Berners-Lee did not see the financial gains from this as he always saw that the Webs greatest strength was that it was free. It was this freedom that led to the innovation. We look forward to the Web’s next evolution in innovation. So, we wish it a Happy Birthday and thank it for making our work possible at Design Toronto Web. All in all, here are Top Four Things you probably didn’t know about the Web.
Top Four Things You Didn’t Know about the Web:
1. The Web is not the Internet. No more than Facebook or Google are the Internet. The Web is just an application built on the platform of the internet. Moreover, it just promoted document linking that didn’t require the documents to be in the same place. Confusing the terms would be like saying that paint is the same thing as a painting.
2. The Web you See is much smaller than the web that is.
The web that is visible (approximately 2.3 billion pages) is only the tip of the iceberg. The back end of the web is thought to be many magnitudes larger. However, this end, not even google get through.
3. Berners-Lee idea was orginally rejected by his boss (CERN). Berners-Lee originally proposed the first concept in 1989. This was to help CERN keep track of data through what he called “Linked Information System.” The idea was rejected. So, Berners-Lee went back to the drawing board. For example, he developed the basic concepts for the World Wide Web including HTML, URI, and HTTP. The first web page went live in 1990. The rest is history.
4. The Web was designed to be available to all. Lastly, Berners-Lee built the Web based on the egalitarian pricipal that all systems of the web needed access to the same information. This is how it is fundamentally a global entity. Without this core principal different entities can control information, which fundamentally undercuts the purpose of the Web to begin with.
