Shannon Glaser

1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the Web with HTML as its publishing language

The World Wide Web began life in the place where you would least expect it: at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is a meeting place for physicists from all over the world, where highly abstract and conceptual thinkers engage in the contemplation of complex atomic phenomena that occur on a minuscule scale in time and space. This is a surprising place indeed for the beginnings of a technology which would, eventually, deliver everything from tourist information, online shopping and advertisements, financial data, weather forecasts and much more to your personal computer.

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the Web. In 1989, Tim was working in a computing services section of CERN when he came up with the concept; at the time he had no idea that it would be implemented on such an enormous scale. Particle physics research often involves collaboration among institutes from all over the world. Tim had the idea of enabling researchers from remote sites in the world to organize and pool together information. But far from simply making available a large number of research documents as files that could be downloaded to individual computers, he suggested that you could actually link the text in the files themselves.

In other words, there could be cross-references from one research paper to another. This would mean that while reading one research paper, you could quickly display part of another paper that holds directly relevant text or diagrams. Documentation of a scientific and mathematical nature would thus be represented as a `web' of information held in electronic form on computers across the world. This, Tim thought, could be done by using some form of hypertext, some way of linking documents together by using buttons on the screen, which you simply clicked on to jump from one paper to another. Before coming to CERN, Tim had already worked on document production and text processing, and had developed his first hypertext system, `Enquire', in 1980 for his own personal use.

Tim's prototype Web browser on the NeXT computer came out in 1990.

Through 1990: The time was ripe for Tim's invention

The fact that the Web was invented in the early 1990s was no coincidence. Developments in communications technology during that time meant that, sooner or later, something like the Web was bound to happen. For a start, hypertext was coming into vogue and being used on computers. Also, Internet users were gaining in the number of users on the system: there was an increasing audience for distributed information. Last, but not least, the new domain name system had made it much easier to address a machine on the Internet.

Hypertext

Although already established as a concept by academics as early as the 1940s, it was with the advent of the personal computer that hypertext came out of the cupboard. In the late 1980s, Bill Atkinson, an exceptionally gifted programmer working for Apple Computer Inc., came up with an application called Hypercard for the Macintosh. Hypercard enabled you to construct a series of on-screen `filing cards' that contained textual and graphical information. Users could navigate these by pressing on-screen buttons, taking themselves on a tour of the information in the process.

Hypercard set the scene for more applications based on the filing card idea. Toolbook for the PC was used in the early 1990s for constructing hypertext training courses that had `pages' with buttons which could go forward or backward or jump to a new topic. Behind the scenes, buttons would initiate little programs called scripts. These scripts would control which page would be presented next; they could even run a small piece of animation on the screen. The application entitled Guide was a similar application for UNIX and the PC.

Hypercard and its imitators caught the popular imagination. However, these packages still had one major limitation: hypertext jumps could only be made to files on the same computer. Jumps made to computers on the other side of the world were still out of the question. Nobody yet had implemented a system involving hypertext links on a global scale.

The domain name system

By the middle 1980s, the Internet had a new, easy-to-use system for naming computers. This involved using the idea of the domain name. A domain name comprises a series of letters separated by dots, for example: `www.bo.com' or `www.erb.org.uk'. These names are the easy-to-use alternative to the much less manageable and cumbersome IP address numbers.

A program called Distributed Name Service (DNS) maps domain names onto IP addresses, keeping the IP addresses `hidden'. DNS was an absolute breakthrough in making the Internet accessible to those who were not computer nerds. As a result of its introduction, email addresses became simpler. Previous to DNS, email addresses had all sorts of hideous codes such as exclamation marks, percent signs and other extraneous information to specify the route to the other machine.

Choosing the right approach to create a global hypertext system

To Tim Berners-Lee, global hypertext links seemed feasible, but it was a matter of finding the correct approach to implementing them. Using an existing hypertext package might seem an attractive proposition, but this was impractical for a number of reasons. To start with, any hypertext tool to be used worldwide would have to take into account that many types of computers existed that were linked to the Internet: Personal Computers, Macintoshes, UNIX machines and simple terminals. Also, many desktop publishing methods were in vogue: SGML, Interleaf, LaTex, Microsoft Word, and Troff among many others. Commercial hypertext packages were computer-specific and could not easily take text from other sources; besides, they were far too complicated and involved tedious compiling of text into internal formats to create the final hypertext system.

What was needed was something very simple, at least in the beginning. Tim demonstrated a basic, but attractive way of publishing text by developing some software himself, and also his own simple protocol - HTTP - for retrieving other documents' text via hypertext links. Tim's own protocol, HTTP, stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. The text format for HTTP was named HTML, for HyperText Mark-up Language; Tim's hypertext implementation was demonstrated on a NeXT workstation, which provided many of the tools he needed to develop his first prototype. By keeping things very simple, Tim encouraged others to build upon his ideas and to design further software for displaying HTML, and for setting up their own HTML documents ready for access.

Tim bases his HTML on an existing internationally agreed upon method of text mark-up

The HTML that Tim invented was strongly based on SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language), an internationally agreed upon method for marking up text into structural units such as paragraphs, headings, list items and so on. SGML could be implemented on any machine. The idea was that the language was independent of the formatter (the browser or other viewing software) which actually displayed the text on the screen. The use of pairs of tags such as TITLE is taken directly from SGML, which does exactly the same. The SGML elements used in Tim's HTML included P (paragraph); H1 through H6 (heading level 1 through heading level 6); OL (ordered lists); UL (unordered lists); LI (list items) and various others. What SGML does not include, of course, are hypertext links: the idea of using the anchor element with the HREF attribute was purely Tim's invention, as was the now-famous `www.name.name' format for addressing machines on the Web.

Basing HTML on SGML was a brilliant idea: other people would have invented their own language from scratch but this might have been much less reliable, as well as less acceptable to the rest of the Internet community. Certainly the simplicity of HTML, and the use of the anchor element A for creating hypertext links, was what made Tim's invention so useful.

September 1991: Open discussion about HTML across the Internet begins

Far from keeping his ideas private, Tim made every attempt to discuss them openly online across the Internet. Coming from a research background, this was quite a natural thing to do. In September 1991, the WWW-talk mailing list was started, a kind of electronic discussion group in which enthusiasts could exchange ideas and gossip. By 1992, a handful of other academics and computer researchers were showing interest. Dave Raggett from Hewlett-Packard's Labs in Bristol, England, was one of these early enthusiasts, and, following electronic discussion, Dave visited Tim in 1992.

Here, in Tim's tiny room in the bowels of the sprawling buildings of CERN, the two engineers further considered how HTML might be taken from its current beginnings and shaped into something more appropriate for mass consumption. Trying to anticipate the kind of features that users really would like, Dave looked through magazines, newspapers and other printed media to get an idea of what sort of HTML features would be important when that same information was published online. Upon return to England, Dave sat down at his keyboard and resolutely composed HTML+, a richer version of the original HTML.

Late 1992: NCSA is intrigued by the idea of the Web

Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Tim's ideas had caught the eye of Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson, both of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, a research institute at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. They managed to connect to the computer at CERN and download copies of two free Web browsers. Realizing the importance of what they saw, NCSA decided to develop a browser of their own to be called Mosaic. Among the programmers in the NCSA team were Marc Andreessen - who later made his millions by selling Web products - and the brilliant programmer Eric Bina - who also became rich, courtesy of the Web. Eric Bina was a kind of software genius who reputedly could stay up three nights in succession, typing in a reverie of hacking at his computer.

December 1992: Marc Andreessen makes a brief appearance on WWW- talk Early Web enthusiasts exchanged ideas and gossip over an electronic discussion group called WWW-talk. This was where Dave Raggett, Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly and others debated how images (photographs, diagrams, illustrations and so on) should be inserted into HTML documents. Not everyone agreed upon the way that the relevant tag should be implemented, or even what that tag should be called. Suddenly, Marc Andreessen appeared on WWW-talk and, without further to-do, introduced an idea for the IMG tag by the Mosaic team.

It was quite plain that the others were not altogether keen on the design of IMG, but Andreessen was not easily redirected. The IMG tag was implemented in the form suggested by the Mosaic team on its browser and remains to this day firmly implanted in HTML. This was much to the chagrin of supporters back in academia who invented several alternatives to IMG in the years to come. Now, with the coming of HTML 4, the OBJECT tag potentially replaces IMG, but this is, of course, some years later.

March 1993: Lou Montulli releases the Lynx browser version 2.0a

Lou Montulli was one of the first people to write a text-based browser, Lynx. The Lynx browser was a text-based browser for terminals and for computers that used DOS without Windows. Lou Montulli was later recruited to work with Netscape Communications Corp., but nonetheless remained partially loyal to the idea of developing HTML as an open standard, proving a real asset to the HTML working group and the HTML Editorial Board in years to come. Lou's enthusiasm for good, expensive wine, and his knowledge of excellent restaurants in the Silicon Valley area were to make the standardization of HTML a much more pleasurable process.

Early 1993: Dave Raggett begins to write his own browser

While Eric Bina and the NCSA Mosaic gang were hard at it hacking through the night, Dave Raggett of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol was working part-time on his Arena browser, on which he hoped to demonstrate all sorts of newly invented features for HTML.

April 1993: The Mosaic browser is released

In April 1993, version 1 of the Mosaic browser was released for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s workstation, a computer used in software development running the UNIX operating system. Mosaic extended the features specified by Tim Berners-Lee; for example, it added images, nested lists and fill-out forms. Academics and software engineers later would argue that many of these extensions were very much ad hoc and not properly designed.

Late 1993: Large companies underestimate the importance of the Web

Dave Raggett's work on the Arena browser was slow because he had to develop much of it single-handedly: no money was available to pay for a team of developers. This was because Hewlett-Packard, in common with many other large computer companies, was quite unconvinced that the Internet would be a success; indeed, the need for a global hypertext system simply passed them by. For many large corporations, the question of whether or not any money could be made from the Web was unclear from the outset.

There was also a misconception that the Internet was mostly for academics. In some companies, senior management was assured that the telephone companies would provide the technology for global communications of this sort, anyway. The result was that individuals working in research labs in the commercial sector were unable to devote much time to Web development. This was a bitter disappointment to some researchers, who gratefully would have committed nearly every waking moment toward shaping what they envisioned would be the communications system of the future.

Dave Raggett, realizing that there were not enough working hours left for him to succeed at what he felt was an immensely important task, continued writing his browser at home. There he would sit at a large computer that occupied a fair portion of the dining room table, sharing its slightly sticky surface with paper, crayons, Lego bricks and bits of half-eaten cookies left by the children. Dave also used the browser to show text flow around images, forms and other aspects of HTML at the First WWW Conference in Geneva in 1994. The Arena browser was later used for development work at CERN.

May 1994: NCSA assigns commercial rights for Mosaic browser to Spyglass, Inc.

In May 1994, Spyglass, Inc. signed a multi-million dollar licensing agreement with NCSA to distribute a commercially enhanced version of Mosaic. In August of that same year, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the home of NCSA, assigned all future commercial rights for NCSA Mosaic to Spyglass.

May 1994: The first World Wide Web conference is held in Geneva, with HTML+ on show

Although Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had commercial interests in mind, the rest of the World Wide Web community had quite a different attitude: they saw themselves as joint creators of a wonderful new technology, which certainly would benefit the world. They were jiggling with excitement. Even quiet and retiring academics became animated in discussion, and many seemed evangelical about their new-found god of the Web.

At the first World Wide Web conference organized by CERN in May 1994, all was merry with 380 attendees - who mostly were from Europe but also included many from the United States. You might have thought that Marc Andreessen, Jim Clark and Eric Bina surely would be there, but they were not. For the most part, participants were from the academic community, from institutions such as the World Meteorological Organization, the International Center for Theoretical Physics, the University of Iceland and so on. Later conferences had much more of a commercial feel, but this one was for technical enthusiasts who instinctively knew that this was the start of something big.

During the course of that week, awards were presented for notable achievements on the Web; these awards were given to Marc Andreessen, Lou Montulli, Eric Bina, Rob Hartill and Kevin Hughes. Dan Connolly, who proceeded to define HTML 2, gave a slide presentation entitled Interoperability: Why Everyone Wins, which explained why it was important that the Web operated with a proper HTML specification. Strange to think that at least three of the people who received awards at the conference were later to fly in the face of Dan's idea that adopting a cross-company uniform standard for HTML was essential.

Dave Raggett had been working on some new HTML ideas, which he called HTML+. At the conference it was agreed that the work on HTML+ should be carried forward to lead to the development of an HTML 3 standard. Dave Raggett, together with CERN, developed Arena further as a proof-of-concept browser for this work. Using Arena, Dave Raggett, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, Håkon Lie and others demonstrated text flow around a figure with captions, resizable tables, image backgrounds, math and other features.

The conference ended with a glorious evening cruise on board a paddle steamer around Lake Geneva with Wolfgang and the Werewolves providing Jazz accompaniment.

Step 3

How the World Wide Web began

copyright © Addison Wesley Longman 1998. All rights reserved.