Networking and Internetworking - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 57

the scientist wished to make results of their research available to CERN in
an easy manner. Berners-Lee developed a program called Enquire to assist
with information sharing, and the program also assisted in keeping track
of the work of visiting scientists. He returned to CERN in the mid-1980s to
work on other projects, and he devoted part of his free time to consider solu-
tions to the information sharing problem. This was eventually to lead to his
breakthrough and his invention of the WWW in 1990.
His vision and its subsequent realization was beneficial to both CERN and
the wider world. He envisioned that all information stored on computers
everywhere was linked and computers were programmed to create a space
where everything could be linked to everything. Berners-Lee essentially cre-
ated a system to give every page on a computer a standard address. This
standard address is called the universal resource locator and is better known
by its acronym URL. Each page is accessible via the hypertext transfer proto-
col (HTTP), and the page is formatted with the hypertext markup language
(HTML). Each page is visible using a Web browser.
The characteristic features of the WWW are as follows:
1. Universal Resource Identifier (later renamed to Universal Resource Locator
[URL]). This provides a unique address code for each Web page.
Browsers decode the URL location to access the Web page. For exam-
ple, www.amazon.com uniquely identifies the Amazon.com host
website in the United States.
2. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is used for designing the layout
of Web pages. It allows the formatting of pages containing hypertext
links. HTML is standardized and controlled by the World Wide Web
Consortium (http://www.w3.org).
3. The Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) allows a new Web page to be
accessed from the current page.
4. A browser is a client program that allows a user to interact with the
pages and information on the WWW. It uses the HTTP protocol to
make requests of Web servers throughout the Internet on behalf of
the browser user.
Inventors tend to be influenced by existing inventions and especially inven-
tions that are relevant to their areas of expertise. The Internet was a key exist-
ing invention, and it allowed worldwide communication via electronic e-mail,
the transfer of files electronically via FTP, and newsgroups that allowed users
to make postings on various topics. Another key invention that was relevant
to Berners-Lee was that of hypertext. This was invented by Ted Nelson in the
1960s, and it allows links to be present in text. For example, a document such
as a topic contains a table of contents, an index, and a bibliography. These
are all links to material that is either within the topic itself or external to the
topic. The reader of a topic is able to follow the link to obtain the internal or