The Beginning: CERN

The World Wide Web began 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.

Tim Berners-Lee was working in a computing services section of CERN in 1989 when he came up with the concept of the Web. His proposal concerned the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discussed the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derived a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.

Berners-Lee's proposal on information management included the following quote: "Meanwhile, several programs have been made exploring these ideas, both commercially and academically. Most of them use 'hot spots' in documents, like icons, or highlighted phrases, as sensitive areas. Touching a hot spot with a mouse brings up the relevant information, or expands the text on the screen to include it. Imagine, then, the references in this document, all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." (Berners-Lee) ¹

The Advent of the Link

At the time Berners-Lee had no idea that his idea would be implemented on such an enormous scale. Particle physics research often involves collaboration among institutes from all over the world. Berners-Lee 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.

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. Berners-Lee thought that this 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.

HTTP for You and Me

Berners-Lee 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. HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. The text format for HTTP was named HTML, for HyperText Mark-up Language. The hypertext implementation was demonstrated on a NeXT workstation, which provided many of the tools Berners-Lee needed to develop his first prototype. By keeping things very simple, he 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. Berners-Lee's prototype Web browser on the NeXT computer came out in 1990.

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, Raggett visited Berners-Lee in 1992.

The two engineers considered how HTML might be taken from its current beginnings and shaped into something more appropriate for mass consumption. Upon return to England, Raggett composed HTML+, a richer version of the original HTML.

A Beautiful Mosaic

Joseph Hardin and Dave Thompson, were both of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, a research institute at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. While at NCSA, they 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 millions by selling Web products, and the programmer Eric Bina, who also became rich due to his work on the Web.

Early Web enthusiasts exchanged ideas and gossip over the WWW-talk mailing list. There Dave Raggett, Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly and others debated how images (photographs, diagrams, illustrations, etc.) should be inserted into HTML documents. Marc Andreessen later appeared on WWW-talk, introducing an idea for the IMG tag by the Mosaic team, which was implemented on its browser and remains an important part of HTML.

The Missing Lynx

Lou Montulli was one of the first people to write a text-based browser, Lynx. 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.

Dave Raggett was at work on his own browser named Arena. Development was slow since he had to develop much of it single-handedly. Hewlett-Packard, in common with many other large computer companies, was unconvinced that the Internet would be a success. At the time, there was also a misconception that the Internet was mostly for academics.

Raggett also used the Arena browser to show text flow around images, forms and other aspects of HTML at the First WWW Conference in Geneva in 1994. Arena was later used for development work at CERN.

Conference Call

The first World Wide Web conference, organized by CERN in May 1994, had 380 attendees. Most were from Europe. Later conferences had much more of a commercial feel, but this one was for technical enthusiasts.

During 1993 and early 1994, lots of browsers had added their own bits to HTML, and the language was becoming ill-defined. In an effort to make sense of the chaos, Dan Connolly and colleagues collected all the HTML tags that were widely used and collated them into a draft document that defined the breadth of what Tim Berners-Lee called HTML 2.

Consortium, Anyone?

During 1993, Marc Andreessen left NCSA and moved to California where he met Jim Clark, who was already well known in Silicon Valley and who had money to invest. Together they formed Mosaic Communications, which then became Netscape Communications Corp. in November, 1994. Netscape did its best to make sure that even those who were relying on a low-bandwidth connection were able to access the Web effectively.

The World Wide Web Consortium was formed in late 1994, and headed up by Tim Berners-Lee. The Consortium sought to fulfill the potential of the Web through the development of open standards. They had a strong interest in HTML.

In August 1995, Microsoft Corp. announced Version 1.0 of Internet Explorer browser. This browser was eventually to compete with Netscape's browser, and to evolve its own HTML features.

I've Been Framed!

Netscape submitted a proposal for frames, which involved the screen being divided into independent, scrollable areas in September 1995.

In November 1995, Dave Raggett called together representatives of the browser companies and suggested they meet as a small group dedicated to standardizing HTML. Lou Montulli from Netscape, Charlie Kindel from Microsoft, Eric Sink from Spyglass, Wayne Gramlich from Sun Microsystems, Dave Raggett, Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly from the W3 Consortium, and Jonathan Hirschman from Pathfinder convened near Chicago and made quick and effective decisions about HTML.

Bert Bos, Håkon Lie, Dave Raggett, Chris Lilley and others from the World Wide Web Consortium and others met in Versailles near Paris in November 1995 to discuss the deployment of Cascading Style Sheets. CSS means that more than one style sheet can interact to produce the final look of the document. Following the success of the meeting, the World Wide Web Consortium formed the HTML Editorial Review Board to help with the standardization process.

Since the IETF HTML working group was having difficulties coming to consensus swiftly enough to cope with such a fast-evolving standard, it was dismantled in December 1995.

Care For a Nice Cuppa Javascript?

The W3 Consortium working draft on Scripting came out in April 1996, based on an initial draft by Charlie Kindel, and, in turn, derived from Netscape's extensions for JavaScript, a W3C working draft on the subject of Scripting, which was written by Dave Raggett.

The worry that a massive introduction of proprietary products would kill the Web continued. Netscape acknowledged that vendors needed to push ahead of the standards process and innovate. They pointed out that, if users like a particular Netscape innovation, then the market would drive it to become a de facto standard. This seemed quite true at the time and Netscape had innovated on top of that standard again. Microsoft Corp. has succeeded in superceding Netscape's dominance by including their Internet Explorer browser with their Windows operating system.