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Web Technology

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On March 2009, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research celebrated the 
20th anniversary of the Web (CERN, 2009).With internet users accounting for 28.5% of the world population in June 2010 (Internet World Stats, 2011), the web's growth and use have become an integral part of modern day living whether for business or entertainment. Its impact and usage in today's world is even more remarkable considering its humble beginnings and origin. For many people the differences between the internet and the web are not clear and in many cases in day to day conversations these terms are used interchangeably to mean the same thing. Therefore to help understand the impact of the web, it would also be helpful to understand how it …show more content…

Although his idea provoked little response, Berners continued in the development of his idea using an at the time new and very specialised personal computer called the NeXT. Development of his ideas was based on the existing technologies of TCP/IP as his chosen network protocol and hypertext. Later joined by CERN engineer Robert Cailliau (Appendix a), Berners began to revise his ideas and started writing the code for his project. From early on, he decided that all programs involved with his project should have acronyms starting with HT for hypertext. This resulted in what we now know as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used to link hypertext document over the internet, and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) a language for formatting and structuring the hypertext documents. The development of HTML would become apparent in its use when he wrote the programme for the worlds first web browser which he called the WorldWideWeb browser. Although this only ran on the NeXT computer system, its Graphical User Interface (GUI) was the first step towards 'making the web an interactive medium' (CERN, 2008) that would make surfing the internet more accessible to people. Along with HTTP and HTML, Berners also developed a way of giving documents addresses for location using a Universal Resource Identifier (URI) which we now more commonly know as a URL -

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