- universal space of information
- an application on the Internet
- often abreviated as “the Web”
- often used as synonym for the Internet, e.g. “browsing the Internet”, but the Web is only one out of a large number of services on the Internet ❗️
Idea
- assign a unique identifier to every resource on the Internet (URL), e.g. any file like document, image, video, etc.
- make documents machine-readable (HTML), e.g. what is a paragraph, what is the title
- allow to link to any resource from within a document (hyperlink), including other documents, creates a “web” of information, collection of connected documents
- design an application layer protocol to transmit a resource (HTTP)
- design an application that can serve a resource on the Web (Web server)
- design an application that can browse the information on the Web given the URLs (Web browser)
- historically used separate subdomain for Web server, since the website was just another service along others like email or FTP, today should use main domain name for HTTP server since the Web is the most prominent service, e.g.
example.com instead of www.example.com
Vision
- share information to foster communication
- decentralised and platform-independent like the Internet itself
- open to everyone to browse and create content, just needs internet access, can set up Web browser or HTTP server
- publishing information is still difficult, because a HTTP server is difficult to set up, i.e. ISPs should give everybody a personal HTTP server already set up
beware: publishing information on a third-party website is not open on the Web, dependent on third-party server, e.g. social network, etc. ❗️
Opportunities
- documents are “live”, browsing the Web always loads the newest version of a document, no out-of-date copies on different computers that need to keep updated
- computers can automate the boring work, e.g. find relevant documents, process documents, etc.
- computers can use information on the Web to augment humans, e.g. analytics, recommendations, etc.
Resources