The information that makes it up lives on many computers around the entire globe, joined:
It evolves in an anarchic fashion: there are bodies such as the world wide web consortium, to coordinate developments in the interests of openness and of the entire community. Web standards have evolved quickly and from many directions, bodies like the web consortium has found it difficult to keep up ...
The term 'Web' tends to produce a picture of a spiders web with radiating lines from a centre. The World Wide Web more resembles the sort of unstructured gossamer layer that you may find on a ploughed field in October ...
This makes information portable between many different computer systems: a Windows computer, an Apple computer, a Unix machine and so on. Central to the growth and ethos of the web is the continued adoption of open standards rather than proprietary ones, producing documents that can be read independent of the computer used to access them. The alternative approach is represented by the fact that it is not unknown for files created say by one version of a spreadsheet to be unreadable by a different version of the same program. This can be an enormous problem even when sharing information across a single organisation.
Mark Annand • Site updated April 12th 2013
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 ...