• A Brief History of the World Wide Web

The Web as it is known colloquially, functions according to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Hypertext is perhaps the Web's most important feature for it enables all web content to be linked. Web pages are created as plain text code written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is based on the ASCII code set. This set of tags is used to define the layout, structure and style of web content. Once uploaded onto the Web, a website can be viewed by anyone connected to the Internet.

The goal of HTML was simple: to create cross-platform compatibility. The idea was that anyone accessing a Web page would be presented with exactly the same information, whether it was accessed via a high-end workstation, a simple terminal on a mainframe, a handheld computer or a Braille output system. "The Web's creators envisioned systems that could read HTML documents aloud, emphasizing headings and pausing between paragraphs. It was the genesis of the world's virtual library"(Veen, 1997). They never anticipated the Web being used for anything other than simple text-based documents.

Businesses were quick to realize the commercial potential that websites offered and soon demanded professional-looking, user-friendly websites that represented their companies. To make their sites as impressive as possible, designers incorporated images, animation, sound and dynamic effects such as DHTML and JavaScript but this resulted in slower download times than the plain text pages, which the Internet was originally designed to transmit. Publication Date: Friday 6th June, 2003

• A Brief History of the Internet

The Internet was born out of a military research project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s, whose goal was to devise a way of successfully transmitting information across large distances in the event of a nuclear attack. To do this it needed to "packet-switch" data via many computers from the host to the recipient. The protocols which define the rules for this information exchange were termed: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and ensured that the information that was carried over the ARPA network could not be interrupted by an enemy attack.

Following the ARPA project, the Internet as it became known continued to grow. As it spread, so did the applications it could support. The Unix operating system developed in the late 60s became a platform for the net. Then along came microprocessors and data storage devices. The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was created in 1972, so too was Telnet which allowed remote users to log on and run programs from home. Gopher enabled information retrieval. In 1977 the email specification was laid down and start-up software companies such as Microsoft and Apple began to flourish.

Throughout the 80s, the Internet was still very much geared towards computer scientists, hackers and university researchers. Then in 1991 at CERN , the European physics laboratory based in Switzerland, a group of scientists led by Tim Berners-Lee developed a system that would bring the Internet to the masses. It was the World-Wide Web. Publication Date: Friday 6th June, 2003