Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
2
The World Wide Web
This chapter will provide a short history of the World Wide Web (Section 2.1)
and an introduction to the basic concepts behind the scenes (Section 2.2).
Thereafter we shall discuss in Section 2.3 the first step towards a machine-
readable language, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and its possible
impact on the current Web landscape on the one hand and its impact on
information integration in general on the other.
2.1 History
Since its early days, the main goal of the Internet was the deployment of a
platform for humans to interact and exchange information. Nevertheless, it
took sometime before it took off in the way we know and use the Internet to-
day. This volume is not about the basic technologies and protocols which were
necessary to build up the necessary infrastructure of the Internet as such,
1
but
we start at the stage when technologies that we now consider as the basis of
the modern Internet had already begun to spread around the globe, i.e. when
the Internet as a medium for communication via email, file transfer via FTP,
and remote server access via TELNET were already fairly well established
in specific communities. Decades ago, the telephone enabled analog spoken
communication across geographic boundaries. The Internet now enabled col-
laboration and free exchange of digital information with several advantages
compared with its analog predecessor. By allowing human users to exchange
and communicate via email, it allowed people to communicate information
asynchronously through free exchange of messages. That is, unlike telephone
communication, information exchange through messages was no longer con-
strained to take place at the same time. However, the user still had to know
very well in advance where to find certain information, and persistent publi-
cation or free availability of information on remote servers was not common.
1
We refer the interested reader to the literature on computer networks, for in-
stance [59, 127], for these fundamental aspects.
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