Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web!

Jump to Untangling the Web or CERNland

Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled ‘Information Management : a Proposal’. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue with the project, but unaware that it would evolve into one of the most important communication tools ever created.

On 13 March Tim Berners-Lee returned to CERN to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web. He was joined by several Web veterans, including Robert Cailliau and Jean-Francois Groff, who worked with Tim Berners-Lee in the early days of the project, and by Ben Segal, who was part of CERN’s computing management team at the time. In between reminiscing about life at CERN and the early years of the Web, the four also gave a demonstration of the first ever Web browser running on the original NeXT computer.

But the event was not just about the history of the Web. In his keynote speech Tim Berners-Lee outlined his hopes and expectations for the future. He explained "There are currently roughly the same amount of Web pages as there are neurons in the human brain". But the difference, he went on to say, is that the number of webpages increases as the Web grows older. His speech was followed by discussions from a panel of Web experts on the future of the Web. (For more details see the "Untangling the Web" article).

The full-length webcast of the event is available on CDS, at this address.
More information on the history of the Web can be found on the first ever webpage: http://info.cern.ch

Untangling the Web

A tour through the Web of the past to the Web of the future.

Flashback to March 1999 and the World Wide Web is 10 years old! You switch on your computer and start the 56kbit/s connection. After 30 seconds listening to the screech as your modem dials, you’re online. Now what? There is no wikipedia, no youtube, no facebook, and the word ‘blog’ doesn’t even exist yet.

Ten years later the World Wide Web is almost unrecognisable. Today the Web is a place not just to find out information or buy commodities, but also to add our own information and to express our own opinions. In the era of ‘Web 2.0’, the users have a much bigger impact on the content. But interestingly, this was a trend that was anticipated by Tim Berners-Lee and his co-workers during the very first days of the Web.

When Berners-Lee created the original Web browser (the software we use to look at Web pages) he designed it to also be an editor –so anyone using the Web could easy make a Web page and keep it updated. But unfortunately it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the idea of the Web as a creative medium became popular.

After leaving CERN, in 1994, Berners-Lee set up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help develop guidelines to ensure long-term growth for the Web. So what other predictions do Berners-Lee and the W3C have for the future of the Web? What might it look like at the age of 30? Here are some of the possibilities:

The Semantic Web is a place where machines can do all the tedious stuff. The concept is to create a Web where machines can read the pages much as we humans read them. It will allow us to "move from using a search engine to an answer engine," explained Chris Bizer, a Web expert. "When I search the Web I don’t want to find documents, I want to find answers to my questions!" If your search engine can understand what a webpage is about, then it can pick out the exact answer to you question, rather than simply presenting you with a list of webpages.

As Tim Berners-Lee puts it: "The Semantic Web is a Web of data. There is a lot of data we all use every day, and it’s not part of the Web. For example, I can see my bank statements on the Web, and my photographs, and I can see my appointments in a calendar. But can I see my photos in a calendar to see what I was doing when I took them? Can I see bank statement lines in a calendar? Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself."

Device independence is a move towards a greater variety of equipment that can connect to the Web. A few years ago, virtually the only way to access the Web was through a personal computer or workstation. Now, mobile phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, interactive television systems, voice response systems, kiosks and even certain domestic appliances can all access the Web. Soon our fridge may be able to go online and order more milk when it knows it has run out!

The Mobile Web is one of the fastest developing areas of Web use at the moment. Already more global web browsing is done on handheld devices, like mobile phones, than on laptops. It is especially important in developing countries, where landlines and broadband are often quite rare. For example, African fishermen are using the Web on old mobile phones to check the market price of fish to make sure they arrive at the best port to sell their daily catch. The W3C is trying to create standards for browsing the Web on phones, and to encourage people to make the Web more accessible to everyone in the world.

For more information on the W3C’s vision for the future of the Web go to: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/future

Play and learn with CERNland

If you’re unable to answer your next-door neighbour’s children’s questions about the LHC and haven’t got time to do any research, tell them to have a look at CERNland! Officially launched on 13 March on the occasion of the Web’s 20th anniversary, CERNland is a website designed to teach young people about CERN’s research in an interactive way. This interactive site contains information about CERN, as well as videos and nine different games on themes ranging from the LHC to the Control Centre, antimatter and even the restaurant. "The main goal is to get the children playing", explains Antonella del Rosso of CERN’s Communication Group, who partly led the project. "And through the games and other interactive activities they will get to know about the research being done here at CERN". The games on the CERNland site do not require any particular expertise but those who click on the information links will be better placed to answer the questions and thus to improve their scores. "Society needs more physicists in a range of sectors", said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer during the official launching. "And the way to attract young people to physics is to engage them early with the kind of discovery-science we do here at CERN, addressing some of the most fundamental questions about our Universe". CERNland has been developed over the last year and a half by a small team led first by Rosy Mondardini and then Antonella del Rosso. However, the current site is a first version and will hopefully be expanded in the near future.

To take a trip to CERNland, click here!