Reinventing the Internet

1. The History of the Web

Nowadays, almost everyone spends time on the internet. Reading articles, using browsers, clicking on links. But only a few wonder: when and who invented the internet? We already know the answer, but things aren’t so straightforward.

It all depends on what you call the internet. Usually, regular users mean one thing, while tech specialists mean something else. The computer network connecting the world's major data centers was created back in the '70s. But the internet that's accessible to regular users (with browsers, links, and webpages) was invented by one person in the early '90s. So here's the story…

In the early '90s, British dude Tim Berners-Lee totally reinvented the internet 🌐. Well, technically, what he invented should really be called the Web: World Wide Web, aka www, aka the web. Yep, one guy invented the World Wide Web 💪.

Between 1986 and 1991, he worked at the CERN research center (in Geneva, Switzerland) on a new standard for scientific documentation. See, scientists typically publish their work as articles, and at the end of the articles, they list references. In other words, scientific knowledge is essentially a list of articles referencing each other.

By the way, modern Wikipedia looks a lot like the web as its creator envisioned it: scientific articles referencing each other, with lists of sources and literature. And if Tim had gotten lucky, the web might still look like that. But somewhere along the way, the world took a wrong turn :)

The web is built on three main technologies:

• HTML page, which contains text, images, and links to other HTML pages.
• Browser, which renders the HTML page in a way that's most convenient for people.
• HTTP protocol—the standard for communication between web servers and browsers, and between servers themselves.

Tim Berners-Lee didn’t so much invent these things as he standardized them. HTML was based on the SGML standard. Tags were borrowed from there too. But the first-ever web browser, named WorldWideWeb, was written by Tim himself, all the way back in 1990.

2. HTML Is Not a Programming Language

HTML—it's not a programming language and never has been. Don't ever say that. Even when you're writing your resume, do not list HTML under programming languages—only under "Tools" (technologies). Claiming you know the programming language HTML in your resume is a major no-no. Why is that?

Well, because HTML is a markup language for documents. Simply put, an HTML document is just text (a document) with embedded images, tables, links, and stuff like that.

For example, say you want to write an article where you’ll have:

• The article’s title (a headline).
• The actual article, which is one paragraph.
• An image.
• A few key points you want to highlight in bold.
• A link to some helpful resource in the middle of your article.

Here’s how that document will look in a browser:

Domestic Cat From the standpoint of scientific classification, domestic cats are mammals in the cat family of the carnivore order. Often, domestic cats are seen as a subspecies of wild cats, but as of modern biological classification (as of 2017), domestic cats are considered a separate biological species.

Not bad, huh? The HTML standard ensures that this document is readable for both humans and computers. Here's what it looks like in HTML:

Special tags were added to the article text that both humans and computers (browsers) can understand. Browsers can display the article nicely for readers, and the article's creator can easily edit it.

3. The Emergence of the HTTP Protocol

The abbreviation HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. Hypertext is a document made up of pages that link to one another. So, what’s HTTP?

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol—a protocol (standard) for transferring hypertext. You can see http (or https) in your browser's address bar when copying the link of an open page.

A typical link to a page looks like this:

http://google.com/logo.jpg

At the beginning of the link, there's the protocol name, followed by a colon and two slashes. Tim Berners-Lee once said in an interview that if he'd known how popular HTTP would become, he would've chosen something shorter (since practically every link in the world starts with http:// or https://).

Fun fact: Tim is still alive, and he’s about 70 years old. He uses the internet every day, and his favorite quote is, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." How would you feel if something you invented was used by the entire planet every single day?