Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Note:
As an example of the extended community reach of the Internet,
the international youth World Organization of the Scout Movement has
conducted a World Scout Jamboree On The Internet (JOTI) since 1996,
including thousands of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Explorer Scouts from
countries on all continents save Antarctica.
The World Wide Web
The TCP/IP-based ARPANET became the common Internet link between
research institutes, businesses, and individuals at home. The World Wide
Web (WWW) soon lived up to its name. Today, many telephones have
Web browsers and client applications that offer a rich panoply of media
and services anywhere. Because of this expansion, the governance of the
Internet has grown into an international matter, leaving U.S. government
control in 2009.
Recent developments include the use of non-English-language charac-
ter sets for domain naming and the rapid extension of the original hier-
archical namespace of .com, .gov, .edu sites. The evolution of the WWW
is considered to have occurred in several stages, marking the evolution of
content, availability, and offerings.
Web 1.0
The earliest WWW expression included static content pages, similar to
physical publication of information. Web 1.0 pages were often unchang-
ing and rapidly outdated. Visitors to Web 1.0 pages generally had no
mechanism for modifying or adding to the content presented. The Web
1.0 spectrum of applications and proprietary information interchange
maintained a balkanization of early WWW efforts, separated into pools
of vendor-specific or browser-specific offerings.
Web 1.0 technologies were often tied to software licensing that pre-
vented development of complementary applications without paying for
access to APIs and proprietary standards. The Graphics Interchange
Format (GIF) image compression that was popular with CompuServe
users in the late 1980s is a perfect example of this, where issues over
software patents caused the emergence of the newer Portable Network
Graphics (PNG) standard.
