Wow, been a while since I updated this! Time to go back through the hand written scrawl and put something in the outer bloggersphere ;)
Ok, week three, hmm, that's right - what is the world wide web? To understand what is the world wide web, we need to look at how it evolved. This week's lecture went back to where it started and looked at some visionary people who were instrumental in making the web what it is today.
Firstly Vannevar Bush and his article written in 1945 entitled "As we may think" talked about how people discovered new knowledge and that the human brain uses nodes to remember relationships. He used this idea to design a machine known as a "Memex" who he envisaged would lead to people being able to follow their own trail of information through associations.
Fast forwarding through time and another innovator, popularly known as the father of the world wide web, is Tim Burners-Lee. His proposal in 1990 envisioned a system of networked computers that could converse in a common protocol and allow a hypertext system to develop upon which users could have access to and share information. The proposal introduced the http protocol, the html langauage which provided a common link to other langauges and the concept of a web server which was the backbone of the web in that it was always on. He devised a browser editor which had both writing and editing functions.
Tim Burners-Lee's vision for the web correlated more to the web 2.0 applications which are around today in that all users were able to access and share information, unlike the web1.0 environment which was largely a "read only" experience unless the user had coding skills.
But more on web 2.0 in the next post....
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