World Wide Web What?

Hugh D. Gamble

 

The World Wide Web is not new. It is a complex hyperlinked information space that has been in use by librarians and academics since 1990. Then came the introduction of the first easy to use, graphical web browsers in 1992. Just one more way of viewing little bits of this information. The Web looks different to different people, during different "sessions", and the same published information gets presented in very different ways depending on how it is accessed.  

With a graphical web browser like Mosaic or Netscape, people without a degree in library science could suddenly access information on the Web. A targeted search for anything specific this way was frustrating and futile, but browsing the web provided lots of interesting entertainment. This is when recreational use of the Web became popular.  

With the popularity of web browsers, the nature of Web publishing changed. People started publishing sets of links they wanted people to think of as a "site". Web publishing suddenly became interesting to commercial concerns marketing to a subset of the general public. These publishers tried to maintain fine grained control over the details of how their sites were presented to the readers with a metaphor strongly based in traditional paper based publishing.  

Then came the first easy to use GUI interfaces to the academic search engines. Now people using web browsers could find specific things they were looking for. These search engines soon became so popular as "sites" in their own right that they quickly became the first viable commercial concerns on the Web through the support of advertising revenue. Advertisers pay big $ for exposure to the large numbers of people using a search engine. Even better, the advertising can be associated with what the readers are looking for, giving the advertisers a focussed target audience. Best of all, besides simply buying advertising space, advertisers can pay for priority position in the returned search results. This is worth many millions of $ to international corporations.  

Web publishers started to realize their sites aren't made of paper. They could update content almost instantaneously. They could use technology to figure out who was looking at their content, where they were coming from, and what paths through the web got them there. Publishers started to take back control of how people see their "sites" by providing the content dynamically, and customized for the reader. Publishers try to view accesses to the information they think of as their "site" in terms of virtual "sessions" defined as multiple accesses to some subset of their content by a single reader over an arbitrary time period.  

Web readers started to take advantage of navigation tools and services provided by third party information brokers. Navigation assistants, filters, and software agents are now built in, plugged in, or available through the readers' web browsers. For example, shopping agents such as Jango run on the shopper's computer and provide a virtual catalog of items from all different vendors, based on custom tailored criteria.  

The publisher, with quite different needs and goals from the readers, can't assume that people will see their information as a distinct "site" or even as whole "pages". The increasingly challenging task of web designers is to present the publisher's message so that it comes across when readers view it in different contexts. The site design needs to maintain the reader's attention and also provide easy ways for the reader to navigate through the site while carefully limiting links leaving the site.  

Technology is giving much of the same power to both the readers and publishers on the Web and the ongoing interplay between the software systems employed by either, and other intermediaries is one factor that encourages, even necessitates, taking advantage of the capability to treat web publishing as a continuously ongoing process for the life of a site, not something that can simply be updated on a periodic basis.  

The W3C Consortium is a good and authoritative source for more information about where the Web came from and where it is going.