www @ 30: Web is ‘not the web we wanted,’ says inventor

NEW DELHI: 30 years ago, on March 12, 1989 British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, working for Europe’s physics lab CERN, proposes a decentralised system of information management. It signals the birth of the World Wide Web.

He laid out the basic concepts of the WWW in a proposal which included ideas like HTML, URL and HTTP. His point is that CERN has thousands of employees and new ones arriving all the time, making it complicated to find information that might be related but not stocked in the same place.

In a document titled “Information management: a proposal”, he envisioned the use of hypertext to link documents.

The WWW, commonly known as the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).

The first web browser was released in 1991 — first to the research institutions and then to the general public on the Internet in the same year.

The WWW is the primary tool billions of people today use to interact on the Internet.

In addition to text, web pages may contain images, video, audio and software components that are rendered in the user’s web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content.

Before the WWW, remote computers communicated directly for the first time in 1969 and in 1983, TCP/IP standard was adopted.

On the 30th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web on Tuesday, 63-year-old Englishman speaking at a “Web@30” conference, acknowledged that for those who are online, “the web is not the web we wanted in every respect.”

With agency inputs