25 August, 2007

New Domain, update your bookmarks!

I'm starting a new website at www.liveash.com, and am moving this blog to the new address, blog.liveash.com. Haven't thought of what to put on the main site yet, but will figure out eventually.

Please update your bookmarks and/or feed URLs to point to the new domain.

08 August, 2007

Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web

WWW's historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau, Courtesy: Wikipedia.
WWW's historical logo designed by Robert Cailliau.
Courtesy: Wikipedia.

The World Wide Web turned 16 yesterday.

No, not the 'Internet', which is an interconnected worldwide network of networks through which users connect to (and via) ftp servers, smtp servers, http servers etc. WWW comprises of the interconnected web pages we visit every day; just one of the services of the Internet, provided by http servers (a.k.a. Web Servers). The basis of the WWW (or 'Web') is the Hyper-Text Markup Language, HTML.

The Wired News Article is being copied here:

1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.

The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.

His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.

The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet.

Today's web is far more powerful and sophisticated than the research tool developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau but continues operating on basically the same principles they established a quarter of a century ago.