The World Wide Web's development has involved a series of happy accidents:
The internet started out as a robust network joining military computers, spread into the American scientific community, allowing people to share information.
Using the internet to find and share information wasn't an easy experience but a key development changed this and triggered an explosion of accessible information.
That development was the pairing of HyperText Markup Language or HTML, and a new piece of software, the browser. Information written using HTML, stored on network servers, and called up with browsers, resulted in the world wide web.
Central to HTML is the link - a piece of text or image which the reader can select to move on to a new but related document - essentially providing the threads and leading to the 'web' analogy.
The original web browsers displayed only text: when they were extended to display both text and images, web pages became more seductive and the rate at which material was being added has increased accordingly, exploiting the potential for interactivity, two way communication and much else besides. Commercial interests have now become involved with many newer web sites aimed at business interests.
HTML is intended to structure the information in a document by means of classes, say of headings, lists, emphasis: partly with the intention that the document be searched, automatically, and the content indexed automatically: a parallel function is that a browser can use the HTML to display the content of the document in an attractive and informative way.
All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows. Words found on a door lintel in the garden of a house in the Cretan village of Argiroupolis. The lintel is a fragment from the city state Lappa, which occupied the same site. Fifteen hundred years later, when you use the web, from time to time you might well feel that the author was on to something. And if you work with particle physics, you'll know he was ...