The World Wide Web: 20 Years On

It was 20 years ago this month that Tim Berners-Lee wrote up a proposal for his bosses at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, for a hypertext-based system of connecting information that would use the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet plus a simple addressing scheme. Of course, today, billions of people use the system that came out of that proposal: We call it the World Wide Web, or more familiarly, the Web.

CERN just had a big celebration of the anniversary; and you can see Berners-Lee's original proposal here and read it here.


Berners-Lee readily admits that his work is built on lots of previous innovations. The concept of hyptertext goes back a long way, to Vannevar Bush's Memex proposal and Ted Nelson's Xanadu project. The Internet is built on pioneering efforts by people such as Donald Davis and Paul Barran, who did early work on packet switching, and Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who created the TCP/IP protocol, along with many others. Berners-Lee's big contribution was marrying hypertext and the Internet together in a simple way.

Even once that now-obvious concept was developed, it took a long time for the Web to mature. Berners-Lee's proposal was actually shelved then, and it wasn't until the fall of 1990 that he started coding the program called WorldWideWeb and had developed the basic Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hyptertext Markup Language (HTML), and Universal Resource Identifier (URI, later URL) that are still the basic building blocks of the Web.

And while Berners-Lee developed a basic browser, it took Mark Andreesen and Eric Bina of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois to create Mosaic, the first modern Web browser to gain a large audience. Mosaic, in turn, led to Netscape, and the rest is history (or at least a topic for a different blog post.)

Today, there's a lot of talk about "Web 2.0," which encompasses more interactivity and community online; social applications such as Facebook and Twitter are part of it, for example. But Berners-Lee has been focused mostly on building what he calls "the Semantic Web"--on which a computer program can actually process a Web page enough to get some meaning from it. He's been talking about this idea for years, and a number of other people are working on it as well, including the World Wide Web Consortium, which he runs; the Web Science Research Institute (which I wrote about here), and people in education and in private companies. I've heard some of these Semantic Web ideas referred to as "Web 3.0."

But Web 3.0, Web 2.0, and even the classic Web sites we're all used to wouldn't exist--at least not in their current forms--if it wasn't for that original vision.

PC Magazine gave Berners-Lee a Lifetime Achievement award 10 years ago; and here's a story I wrote about the Semantic Web six years ago.