Architecture of theWorld WideWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 15

2.2 The Terminology of the Web

Can the various technologies that go under the rubric of the World Wide Web be
found to have common principles and terminology? This question would at first
seem to be shallow, for one could say that any technology that is described by its
creators, or even the public at large, can be considered trivially 'part of the Web.'
To further complicate the matter, the terms the 'Web' and the 'Internet' are elided
together in common parlance, and so are often deployed as synonyms. In a single
broad stroke, we can distinguish the Web and the Internet. The Internet is a type of
packet-switching network as defined by its use of the TCP/IP protocol. The purpose
of the Internet is to get bits from one computer to another. In contrast, the Web is
a space of names defined by its usage of URIs. So, the purpose of the Web is the
use of URIs for accessing and referring to information. The Web and the Internet
are then strictly separable, for the Web, as a space of URIs, could be realized on
top of other types of networks that move bits around, much as the same virtual
machine can be realized on top of differing physical computers. For example, one
could imagine the Web being built on top of a network built on principles different
from TCP/IP, such as OSI, an early competitor to the TCP/IP stack of networking
protocols (Zimmerman 1980). Likewise, before the Web, there were a number of
different protocols with their own naming schemes built upon the Internet like
Gopher (Anklesaria et al. 1993).
Is it not presumptuous of us to hope that such an unruly phenomenon such as
the Web even has guiding principles? Again we must appeal to the fact that unlike
natural language or chemistry, the Web is like other engineered artifacts, created
by particular individuals with a purpose, and designed with this purpose in mind.
Unlike the case of the proper function of natural language, where natural selection
itself will forever remain silent to our questions, the principal designers of the
Web are still alive to be questioned in person, and their design rationale is overtly
written down on various notes, often scribbled on some of the earliest web-pages
of the Web itself. It is generally thought of that the core of the Web consists of the
following standards, given in their earliest incarnation: HTTP (Berners-Lee et al.
1996), URI (Berners-Lee 1994a), and HTML (Berners-Lee and Connolly 1993). So
the basic protocols and data formats that proved to be successful were the creations
of a fairly small number of people, such as Tim Berners-Lee, Roy Fielding, and Dan
Connolly.
The primary source for our terminology and principles of Web architecture is
a document entitled The Architecture of the World Wide Web (AWWW), a W3C
Recommendation edited by Ian Jacobs and Norm Walsh to “describe the properties
we desire of the Web and the design choices that have been made to achieve
them” (Jacobs and Walsh 2004). The AWWW is an attempt to systematize the
thinking that went into the design of the Web by some of its primary architects,