13 March 2009

Happy 20th Birthday to the world wide web

When Tim Berners-Lee wrote his Information Management: A Proposal report in 1989, he probably had no idea how much his ideas would change the world. Over the years, his basic outline of the world wide web has changed the way we communicate, shop, do business, travel and more.

What Berners-Lee proposed was to invent was a series of hypertext pages that could be viewed by users on a network. 20 years later, we can do everything online - from talking face-to-face over webcam to shopping for groceries.

Industry website VNUNet reports that the idea for the web first began when personal computers hit the market in the late 1980s, but that the idea of sharing documents through the web took hold through Berners-Lee.

Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at Southampton University, said: "Tim pulled together ideas of a markup language, getting files on the internet and hypertext. The things that made it work were open standards and protocols so anyone could set up their own web server and HTML documents, the fact that it was completely distributed and scalable, and that it worked over the network."

It was only with the advent of broadband and the first web browser Mosaic in the early 1990s that there was an increase in the number of people using the internet in everyday life.

After the boom, the dot-com industry saw a crash, as the technology was not yet able to develop on its promise. Business models fell.

However, since then the industry has experienced unparalleled growth and innovation. And recent times have really seen the internet explode into popular usage. Ovum analyst Mike Davis said: "The exciting stuff has happened in the past three to five years, with the massive increases in speed and ubiquity of access through all sorts of devices."

Since then, the world has been witness to intense development through the internet, which has connected people from across the globe. Analysts note that the web is now used primarily as a communication tool, which has seen the way we talk morph from email to instant messaging and social networking.

Gartner analyst Amanda Sabia said: "Consumer confidence in the web has grown, and they are using it as a source of information more than ever before. We're also seeing this confidence in the [rise of] shopping on the web."

Growth is expected to continue for the web, as many push for the democratisation of domain name services and allowing users to hold more control. In addition, technology including cloud computing and software-as-a-service continues to gain in popularity.

In the end, experts believe growth in the internet will lead to linked data, as the web has already managed linked documents and interactivity.

Hall concludes: "The issue is persuading people to put data on to the web in a standard format... There are pockets where it is happening and, once everyone is doing it and it's at web scale, we'll be able to see what companies start to do with it and how people interact with it."

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