Webbed Planet

However, the fastest-growing, most popular, and most interesting way of accessing information on the Internet is the World Wide Web. The standard framework for the Web was developed between 1989 and 1991 by Timothy Berners-Lee. Hoping to facilitate cooperative work among far-flung researchers, Berners-Lee developed the concept of a database of information linked over a network using hypertext and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the standard codes for displaying text and images. Files on the Web are encoded in HTML to make links and to tell a browser program how to display the Web pages on a computer screen. With the exception of the fonts (the typeface of the text on the page), Web pages look about the same to everyone who uses a graphical Web browser such as Netscape, Mosaic, or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In 1992 there were only a few hundred pages, or screens of information, to look at on the Web. By 1993 there were tens, and then hundreds, of thousands. Now there are tens of millions of Web pages around the world, and the number is growing all the time. It is impossible to know how many total Web pages there are at any given time, and in any case, the number is constantly changing. In April 1996 Lycos, a Web search service, reported indexing 37,643,037 unique Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), the “addresses” of individual Web pages. These Web addresses are recognizable as the strings of characters beginning with “http://” that are proliferating in advertisements and the media. Http stands for “Hypertext Transfer Protocol,” the standard that computers use to transmit and decode information over the Web. This growth means that in a very short time, an immense portion of the world's total information has become available on the World Wide Web. While the World Wide Web doesn't yet match the information resources of a well-stocked research library, it is growing so fast that it may soon become the world's largest storehouse of information. Right now the main limitation of the Web is the absence of an available standard for indexing Web pages; there is nothing like the Dewey Decimal system that libraries use for books and other material. Because of this, searching the Web is frequently a haphazard experience, and it is also hard to judge what is valuable and what just worthless or even wrong information is. But this will change in the future. New services for indexing and new ways for people to get judgments about the quality of information on the Web are in the works. Another limitation of the Web is bandwidth, or how much information can be sent through the wires presently used to ship data around the Internet. The rapid growth of the Web and the related explosion of new users on the Internet are straining the technology now in place. New, better methods of transmission, such as fiber-optic cables and digital switches, are needed to take advantage of the Web's capabilities.