The World Wide Web and the new communication era

Paul A. Soukup SJ

Photo supplied

The World Wide Web transformed the internet from a specialist communication medium into a real innovation in mass media, making the obtaining and publishing of information available to everyone. How did that happen?

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web and the 30th anniversary of its global establishment.

Even after these many years, I still remember the first moment that I encountered the World Wide Web. In my university setting we had already used email and file transfer protocols for a number of years.

We had some familiarity with the Internet, and we could manage a basic interlinking of computers. But to see the combination of visual material, text and references to other documents stored on computers around the world brought together through a simple browser with easy access to linked information was a real eye-opening experience.

The particulars of this invention have to do with information management and the establishing of protocols for identifying material and simplifying data transmission.

These allowed searchers to easily find different kinds of materials, which the web in turn swiftly addressed, located and transmitted to the software that would display the hypertext markup language (html).

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research), established these to facilitate the sharing of documents from CERN's various scientific experiments stored on computers throughout the center.

He proposed such a system in a memo of March 1989. But, as with any innovation, it took time (about five years) to move from concept to working model to global acceptance. And, as with many communication developments, it required secondary inventions to extend the idea far beyond the initial inspiration.

This essay will consider the invention, the infrastructure that makes it work, some of the extensions of that initial invention, its key idea of information management, and the impact that this communication innovation has had on communications around the world.