Berners-Lee’s “The World-Wide Web”
Tim-Berners-Lee’s article, “The World-Wide Web” discusses the technological make-up of the World Wide Web (or the W3, as he calls it). There are many roots which make up the web’s background from Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) to Hypertext Transfer Protocols (HTTPs) to Hypertext markup Language (HTMLs). Together, these help identify and locate information and transfer formats and documents for the user. These features have made it so much easier than the days where people had to type “command language” or “recipes for different systems” (76). Today, we don’t even need to know a site’s web address. We can simply type in what we want to find into Google’s search engine and links to the site appear.
The version of the World Wide Web that Berners-Lee describes is somewhat different than what we know it as today. I’m sure that the 829 registered servers that he quoted there being in April 1994 has reached the millions. Some of his descriptions of the Web seem somewhat primitive today. The version of the Web that he show in Figure 1 even is different from the Web that we use today in appearance. There have been so many advancements since then. The World Wide Web has really changed everyone’s lives.
In his conclusion, Berners-Lee states “the Web does not yet meet its design goal as being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read” (82). However, I do not believe that this holds true today. In recent years, the Web has become much more user and creator friendly. The average person does have the ability to create a website (even if it may be a simple one), provide links to other websites, and to post their thoughts with tools such as blogs. The Web has become a tremendous resource. Today, you can’t even register for the SATs without having internet access. The Web has become engrained in our daily lives.
