World Wide Web

Documents and other web resources on the World Wide Web (www, W3) are identified by URIs, connected to each other by hypertext links, and accessible over the Internet. It is simply known as the web. Hypertext documents, commonly referred to as web pages, are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Web pages may contain links to images, video, and software components that are displayed to the user of a web browser application, running on the user’s computer, as coherent pages of multimedia content. Embedded hyperlinks allow users to navigate between web pages. When many web pages are published with a common theme or within a common domain name, the collection is often called a web site.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. As a CERN employee, Berners-Lee distributed the proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web on March 12, 1989. The initial proposal was intended for a more efficient CERN communication system, but Berners-Lee realized that the concept could be implemented worldwide. Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailleau proposed hypertext in 1990 to “link and access various types of information as a web of nodes that browse at will“, and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December of that year. The first test was completed on December 20, 1990, and Berners-Lee reported on the project in the newsgroup alt.hypertext on August 7, 1991.

History

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee issued a proposal to management at CERN that referred to the database and software project INQUIRE that he had built in 1980 and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded in readable text: “So, all references in this document are to those he cited. Assume that content is associated with a network address, so you can go to them with a mouse click while reading this document. ” Such a system can be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the term hypertext, a term coined in the 1950s, he says. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech, and video, so Berners-Lee proceeds to propose the term hypermedia.

With the help of Robert Cailleau, he published a more formal proposal (on November 12, 1990) to build the “Hypertext Project” into a “World Wide Web” (one term, “W3”) as a “Web” of “hypertext documents”. “Browsers” view using client-server architecture. The proposal was to develop a read-only web in three months and estimate that it would take six months to achieve “the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so] authorship becomes universal” and “automated”. Reader notification when new items of his/her interest become available. ” While the read-only goal was met, the wiki concept, WebDav, blogs, Web 2.0 and accessible authoring of Web content with RSS/Item took longer to mature.

The proposal is modeled after the SGML reader Dynatext, an electronic book technology spin-off from Brown University’s Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship. The CERN-licensed Dynatext system was instrumental in extending SEGML ISO 8879:1986 to hypermedia within hightime, but it was considered too expensive and had a licensing policy unsuitable for use in the general high-energy physics community, namely a per-document and per-document change fee.

Next Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world’s first web server and also used to write the first web browser, the World Wide Web, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working web: the first web browser (which was also a web editor); First web server; And the first web pages that described the project.

The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill, North Carolina, announced in May 2013 that Berners-Lee’s 1991 visit to UNC provided what he said was the oldest web page. Jones stored it on a magneto-optical drive and on his Next computer.

On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext. This date marked the beginning of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet, although new users only accessed it after August 23. For this reason it is considered as Internat day. Several news outlets reported that the first photo on the web was published by Berners-Lee in 1992, a picture of the CERN house band Les Horribles Sernets taken by Silvano Di Gennaro; Gennaro has denied the story, writing that the media is “completely distorting our words for the sake of cheap sensationalism”.

The first server outside of Europe to host the SPIERS-HEP database has been installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California. Accounts differ considerably as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992, but SLAC itself says 1991. This is supported by the W3C document A Little History of the World Wide Web.

The original concept of hypertext originated in earlier projects from the 1960s, such as Brown University’s Hypertext Editing System (HES), Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart’s On-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were inspired by Vannevar Bush’s microfilm-based memes, described in his 1945 essay “As We May Think.”

Berners-Lee’s breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving the Web, he repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible for members of both technological communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he eventually took the project upon himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:

A system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, Universal Document Identifier (UDI), hereafter called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource Identifier (URI);

The publishing language is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML);

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The World Wide Web had several differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The web requires only one-way links rather than two-way directions, making it possible for anyone to link to another resource without any action by the owner of that resource. This significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (compared to previous systems), but it presented the chronic problem of link decay. 

Unlike its predecessors, such as Hypercard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and add extensions without license restrictions. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web was free to anyone, no charge. Two months after announcing that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer open to use, this caused a rapid shift away from Gopher and toward the Web. ViolaWW was an early popular web browser for the Unix and X windowing systems.

Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began in 1993 with the introduction of the Mosaic Web browser, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic comes from the U.S. Derived from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High-Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, the U.S. 

One of several computing developments pioneered by Senator Al Gore. Before the release of Mosaic, graphics could not usually be mixed with text on web pages, and the popularity of the web was less than that of older protocols in use on the Internet, such as Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic’s graphical user interface allowed the Web to become the most popular Internet protocol.

After leaving the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It was established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS). support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which pioneered the Internet; A year later, a second site was established at INRIA (French National Computer Research Laboratory) with the support of the European Commission DG INFO; And in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. By late 1994, the total number of websites was still relatively small, but many notable websites were already active that foreshadowed or inspired today’s most popular services.

Connecting from the existing Internet, other websites were created around the world by adding international standards for domain names and HTML. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of web standards (such as markup languages ​​for composing web pages), and advocated the vision of the Semantic Web. 

The World Wide Web enabled information to be disseminated over the Internet in an easy-to-use and flexible format. It has played an important role in popularizing the use of internet. Although the two terms are sometimes combined in popular usage, the World Wide Web is not synonymous with the Internet. The Web is an information space consisting of hyperlinked documents and other resources, identified by their URIs. It is implemented as client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP.

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are used interchangeably. However, the two things are not the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the World Wide Web is one of the services transferred through these networks. It is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessible from web servers by web browsers.

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web usually begins by typing the page’s URL into a web browser or following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages and move from one web page to another via hyperlinks became known as ‘browsing,’ ‘web surfing,’ (later channel surfing), or ‘navigating the web.’ . Early studies of this new behavior investigated user patterns in using web browsers. For example, one study found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation, and targeted navigation.

The following example shows the behavior of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL http://example.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web. A browser resolves a URL’s server name (example.org) to an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address like 203.0.113.4. A browser requests a resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests the service from a specific TCP port number known to the HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish the HTTP request from other network protocols it is serving. HTTP protocol usually uses port number 80. The body of an HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text:

GET / wiki / World_Wide_Web HTTP / 1.1

Host: example.org

A computer that receives an HTTP request delivers it to web server software that listens for requests on port 80. If the web server is able to fulfill the request it sends an HTTP response to the browser indicating success:

HTTP / 1.0 200 OK

Content-Type: Text / HTML; charset = UTF-8

Then the content of the requested page. Hypertext Markup Language for Basic Web Page <html> <head> <title> Example.org – World Wide Web </ title> </ head> <body> <p> The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as… </ p> </body> </html>

A web browser parses HTML and defines the markup (<heading>, <p> paragraph, and so on) surrounding the words to format the text on the screen. Many Web pages use HTML to refer to URLs of other resources, such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behavior, and cascading style sheets that affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types. As it receives its content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page on the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources.

Linking

Most Web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and possibly to downloadable files, source documents, definitions, and other Web resources. In the underlying HTML, the hyperlink looks like <a href=”http://example.org/wiki/Main_Page Si> Example.org, the free encyclopedia.

GET/ wiki/ World_Wide_Web HTTP/ 1.1

A collection of useful, related resources interconnected by hypertext links is called the Web of Information. Publishing on the Internet was first called the World Wide Web (rejected in its original CamelCase) by Tim Berners-Lee in November 1990.

A Webgraph describes the hyperlink structure of the WWW: the nodes of a Webgraph correspond to Web pages (or URLs) with directed edges between them that correspond to hyperlinks.

Over time, many Web resources indicated by hyperlinks disappear, move, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon known in some circles as link rot, and hyperlinks affected by it are often called dead links. The ephemeral nature of the web has prompted many efforts to archive websites. The most famous of such efforts is the Internet Archive, active since 1996.

Dynamic updates of web pages

JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich of Netscape for use in web pages. The standard version is ecimascript. To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). A client-side script is delivered with the page that makes additional HTTP requests to the server in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed time. The server’s responses are used to modify the current page instead of creating a new page with each response, so the server only needs to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with the page while retrieving data. Web pages can regularly poll the server to check if new information is available.

WWW prefix

Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the longstanding practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide. A web server’s hostname is often www, which can be ftp for an FTP server, and news or ntp for a usnet net server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of www is not required by any technical or policy standard and many websites do not use it; In fact, the very first web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch. 

According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of www as a subdomain was accidental; The World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch, while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page, but the DNS records were never changed, and the practice domain name was subsequently copied to prepare www for the organization’s website. Many established websites still use the prefix, or they use other subdomain names such as www2, secure or en for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (eg, Example.com) and the www subdomain (eg, Www.example.com) refer to the same site; Others require one form or another, or they may map to different websites.

The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Currently, since only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved using a bare domain root.

When a user submits an incomplete domain name to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try to add the “www” prefix to its beginning and possibly “.com”, “.org” and “.net” to the end, depending on what may have been missed. For example, entering ‘Microsoft’ can be converted to http://www.microsoft.com/ and ‘OpenOffice’ to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox, when it was titled ‘Firebird’ in early 2003, from earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx. Microsoft was reportedly granted a US patent for a similar idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.

In English, www is usually pronounced double-u double-u double-u. Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub, especially in New Zealand. Stephen Fry, in his “Podgrams” series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh. English writer Douglas Adams once quoted in The Independent on Sunday (1999): “I only know the World Wide Web, whose acronym takes three times as long as its shortest”. In Mandarin Chinese, the World Wide Web is usually translated into wan yi wang (万维网) through a fo-semantic match, which satisfies www and means “net of countless dimensions”, a translation that reflects the design concept and diffusion of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee’s Web-Space states that the World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens.

The use of the www prefix is ​​waning as Web 2.0 allows web applications to brand their domain names and make them easier to pronounce. As the mobile web became popular, services such as Gmail.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com were often referred to without the addition of “www”. (or, actually, “.com”) to the domain.

Scheme Specifiers

The scheme specifiers http:// and https:// at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure, respectively. They specify the communication protocol to use for request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the encryption layer included in HTTPS is necessary when browsers send or retrieve confidential data such as passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically omit http:// for user-entered URIs.

Web Security

For criminals, the web is the preferred way to spread malware. Cyber ​​crime on the web can include identity theft, fraud, espionage and intelligence gathering. Web-based vulnerabilities have now surpassed traditional computer security concerns, and as measured by Google, one in ten web pages may contain malicious code. Most web-based attacks take place on legitimate websites, and most are hosted in the United States, China and Russia, as measured by Sophos. Common among all malware threats is the SQL injection attack against websites. Through HTML and URIs, the web was vulnerable to attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) that came with the introduction of JavaScript and were exacerbated to some extent by Web 2.0 and Ajax web design, which supported the use of scripts. 

According to an estimate today, 70% of all websites are open to XSS attacks on their users. Phishing is another common threat to the web. “SA, the security arm of EMC, today published the findings of its January 2013 fraud report, estimating global losses from phishing at $1.5 billion in 2012.” Two of the most popular phishing methods are stealth redirection and open redirection.

Proposed solutions vary to extremes. Big security vendors like McAfee have already designed governance and compliance suites to meet post-9/11 regulations, and some like Finzen recommend active real-time review of code and all content, regardless of its origin. Some have argued that if the industry is to see security as a business opportunity rather than a cost center, “ubiquitous, always-on-digital rights management” implemented by a handful of organizations in infrastructure must replace the hundreds of companies securing data and networks today. . Jonathan Zitrain says users who share responsibility for computing security are more apt to lock down the Internet.