Today, March 12th, 2019, marks effectively the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web; the most well known aspect of the greater computer network known as the internet.
More accurately, today marks the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee the “father” of the Web, submitted his paper, titled ” Information Management: A Proposal” to CERN, which discussed the concepts that would be the basis of the World Wide Web as we know it – (from Wikipedia) “an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://www.example.com/), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible via the Internet. “
http://cds.cern.ch/record/1405411/files/ARCH-WWW-4-010.pdf You can read the document in question here. Note the text hand written at the top “vague but exciting.” Oh, how exciting it would all prove to be. An interesting, if somewhat by its nature sterile read.
I’m not going to sit here and type up the history of the internet, how it works, what have you — you can find that info in links which will be shared at the end of this article. It’s funny, how ubiquitous the World Wide Web actually is that this is something to think about and consider — all of these standards had to be created and accepted by enough people, groups, companies, to become what they have been.
It’s honestly hard to describe – I mean, we all know how the web works — you’re using to view this site, after all – but at the same time it’s something so complex and alien to the average person. It’s only by the sheer ubiquity of it that people really “get it” like they do, and I’m kind of glad that it is understood as it is — most everyone can use a web page, they can click (or tap) on a link to go to more information. That’s all there is to it, but even a concept that simple is so much more complex when you really get into it — the nature of TCP/IP, hyperlinks, domains and URL’s, and with the growth of web technologies, well, there’s a lot to it all.
So, all I can say is, a happy birthday to one of the most massive and in a way most incredible things humanity has ever created. It’s rare to celebrate the creation of a semi-tangible concept, like the World Wide Web, but if there’s anything internet wise that’s worth thinking about in such a way, the Web would be it.
Below are some hyperlinks for those wanting more information. Enjoy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web