Varsity's Play

This essay was intended to give the reader of what the World Wide Web is, what it does compared to other systems, and what the future holds for it.

These authors say that the “World Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.” The Web we know today is definitely a pool of human knowledge and millions of humans share their knowledge and ideas every single day (sometimes with a common project….)

They then go on to describe what W3 defines. The first is Universal Resource Identifiers which “…are the strings used as addresses of objects on the Web.” The second is Hypertext Transfer Protocol, known more conventionally to us as “HTTP” which we see every time we get on the internet at the top of our browser. HTTP is ‘…a protocol for transferring information with the efficiency necessary for making hypertext jumps.” This data can be anything from images to just text. Following HTTP, the authors explain HTML. This came from the Web’s need of a common basic language for hypertext. HTML became that language and a lot of the Web was constructed from it.

The rest of the essay is comparing W3 to other systems and then the future of the Web. Regarding the future, in 1994 the Web was already a place of communication and learning, along with a marketplace, but it was not as easy to read and update as the designers would have liked it to be. They had many hopes for the future including a “easy-to-use servers for low-end machines to ease publication of information by small groups and individuals” among many other things. Since then, any human can confirm that the Web has improved light years in compared to what it was when it first began. The fact is that the Web is amazing; we talk about its uses and benefits every day in class. There’s way too many to list in one blog.

This incredible diversity of information that we have access to at the tip of our fingers and the promise of better technology in the future gives us a very good reason to be excited about what’s going to be available next.