10 things you probably didn’t know about the Web

10 things you probably didn’t know about the Web

We recently saw the wonderful world of the Web turn 30 years old this month, the official anniversary website hosted by the World Wide Web Consortium and World Wide Web Foundation, have been celebrating this anniversary in various ways – enabling people to send birthday greetings to the Web, a video message from the inventor himself, Tim Berners-Lee, and even some interesting facts and figures about the Web and its creation.

We read Ian Jacob’s article about ’25 things you probably didn’t know about the Web’ and thought we would refine it further by hand picking the 10 best facts gathered from this list that you probably didn’t know about the web.

1. Before settling on “the Web,” Berners-Lee thought of the names “Information Mesh”, “The Information Mine”, and “Mine of Information”.

2. Mike Sendall, Berners-Lee’s manager at the time, commented on the original proposal “Vague, but exciting.” Fortunately, Sendall thought enough of the proposal to allow Berners-Lee to work on it on the side.

3. The first Web site was info.cern.ch, hosted by CERN, on Tim’s desktop computer.

4. A few simple ideas have played a key role in making the Web a success:

• It is universal: it can be made to work with any form of data, on any device, with any software, in any language. You can link to any piece of information.
• It is decentralised: anybody can create a site. This enabled the Web to grow quickly.
• The core technology is royalty-free: because people can implement Web technology royalty-free, this spurs innovation.
• It is the result of global collaboration.

5. The Web is not the same thing as the Internet. The Internet protocols describe how to send packets of information between pieces of software. The first Internet protocols were defined in 1969. Since then, many applications have used them in different ways, including Email, FTP, and the Web. The Web is any information that is identified with a URL (Universal Resource Locator). That makes the URL the most fundamental piece of Web technology.

6. Although many Web site addresses start with “www” there is no requirement they begin this way; it was just an early convention to help people recognise that someone was running a Web server.

7. In October 1994, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop common standards for core Web technology. The goal of the organisation is to ensure the Web is available to all, and not fragmented into proprietary silos. Today four neutral academic organisations host the activities of the Consortium: MIT, ERCIM, Keio University and Beihang University.

8. Today it is estimated that just under 40% of the world’s population has Internet access. On average, a fixed broadband connection costs over a third of income in the developing world. (Source: ITU)

9. The languages most used in online communications are, in order: English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese.

10. Internet live stats estimates that the number of Web sites will reach 1 billion by the end of 2014, this anniversary year.