Web Standards

We'll keep this very brief, as there are many (more) detailed accounts of the web's history out there, which we'll link to later on (also try searching for "history of the web" in your favorite search engine and see what you get, if you are interested in more detail.)

In the late 1960s, the US military developed a communication network called? ARPANET. This can be considered a forerunner of the Web, as it worked on?Packet Switching, and featured the first implementation of the?TCP/IP?protocol suite. These two technologies form the basis of the infrastructure that the internet is built on.

In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee (often referred to as TimBL) wrote a notebook program called ENQUIRE, which featured the concept of links between different nodes. Sound familiar?

Fast forward to 1989, and TimBL wrote?Information Management: A Proposal ?and HyperText at CERN; these two publications together provided the background for how the web would work. They received a fair amount of interest, enough to convince TimBL's bosses to allow him to go ahead and create a global hypertext system.

By late 1990, TimBL had created all the things needed to run the first version of the web —?HTTP,HTML, the first web browser, which was called?WorldWideWeb, an HTTP server, and some web pages to look at.

In the next few years that followed, the web exploded, with multiple browsers being released, thousands of web servers being set up, and millions of web pages being created. OK, that's a very simple summary of what happened, but we did promise you a brief summary.

One last significant data point to share is that in 1994, TimBL founded the World Wide Web Consortium??(W3C), an organization that brings together representatives from many different technology companies to work together on the creation of web technology specifications. After that other technologies followed such as?CSS?and?JavaScript, and the web started to look more like the web we know today.