What is the Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW), often called the web, is an information system in which Uniform Resource Locators identify documents and other web resources (URLs), such as https://abcd.com/, which can be interconnected by hyperlinks and are accessible through the Internet. The Web’s resources are sent using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), may be viewed by users using a software program known as a web browser, and are published by a software program known as a web server. The World Wide Web is not identical with the Internet, which predates the Web in some form by more than two decades and is built on the same technology.
History of Web
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific institution situated in Geneva, Switzerland, began developing the World Wide Web in 1989. They created a protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to standardize communication between servers and clients.
Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web for the first time in March 1989, then again in May 1990. It was developed as a management proposal in November 1990, collaborating with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau. This section described the fundamental principles and identified keywords related to the Web. For example, the document mentioned a “hypertext project” named “WorldWideWeb,” in which “browsers” could see a “web” of “hypertext documents”.
The World Wide Web gained popularity quickly with the introduction of Mosaic, a Web browser created in the United States by Marc Andreessen and others at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and launched in September 1993. Mosaic enabled Web users to do the same “point-and-click” graphical operations that had been accessible on computers for some time.
The World Wide Web had lots of active users by the mid-1990s. Andreessen founded Netscape Navigator, which was released in December 1994, quickly became the dominant Web browser. That same year, BookLink Technologies introduced InternetWorks, the first browser with tabs, allowing users to access another Website without creating a new window.
Web 1.0 to Web 4.0
Web 1.0 is the first version of the web, and according to Berners-Lee, it may be regarded as the read-only web and a cognitive system. Web 1.0 originated as a platform for companies to broadcast their information to the public. The early web allowed for minor user interactions or content contributions and enabled users to search for and read data.
Dale Dougherty described Web 2.0 as a read-write web in 2004. Web 2.0 technologies enable the collection and management of enormous worldwide audiences with shared interests in social interactions. However, there is a vast difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0.
Web 3.0, also known as semantic web, aims to reduce human actions and decisions and delegate them to computers by making web information machine-readable. In general, web 3.0 consists of two major platforms: social computing environment and semantic technologies. The social computing environment facilitates human-machine collaboration and the organization of a vast number of social web groups. Semantic technologies are open standards that may be used on top of the web.
Web 4.0 will be a read-write-execution-concurrency web with innovative interfaces, although no precise description has been provided. Web 4.0 is also known as the symbiotic web since it allows the human mind and robots to communicate symbiosis.
