01/08/2022
August 1 is World Wide Web Day
WWW was introduced in 1990 as hypertext links, while today we can celebrate it by
- getting online,
- posting selfies on social platforms,
- reading and writing blogs,
- expressing our opinions and arguing with people online,
- listening to podcasts and music,
- holding online conferences with colleagues,
- booking appointments,
- syncing devices,
- backing up our data to servers across the world,
- and so much more.
Let’s look at this invention as a case study of solving the problem.
The inventor:
Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer working at CERN (a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland)
The problem:
- information on computers was hard to share between users
- information was often in different programming languages
The solution:
URL – Uniform Resource Locator (a unique address to identify each resource on the Web)
HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol (allows to retrieve linked resources from any address)
HTML – HyperText Markup Language (provides formatting)
These three pieces of technology were initially combined to make CERN employees’ lives easier.
But the concept worked so well that by the mid-1990s lots of businesses started building their presence on the World Wide Web to win the competition. Regular users followed very soon.
Yet today, many people simply don’t realize the web's full potential. This is why August 1 is such an excellent opportunity to dive deeper and discover more things that are now possible to do online.
