I was listening to a podcast yesterday, and it struck me, not for the first time, that many people tend to overuse the phrase Web2.0. It’s like it’s some mantra that will instantaneously transform understanding. It must be important because everyone uses it. Heck, I use it quite often, but I think most people miss the sense of irony imbued in the term.
So I took a wander down memory lane yesterday. I strolled leisurely through the archives of W3C – gee, there’s some interesting stuff there. Most of it is a bit too technical for me, so I may have missed something important in my wander. But the idea of the web, the thing many of us use everyday, is so much bigger than what we have. You just have to watch Tim Berners-Lee at TED to get a glimpse of what’s to come. He’s still coming up with new ideas for this thing he unleashed and he’s still really excited about it.
But the division between so-called Web1.0 and Web2.0 is a bit misleading. It’s kind of like the first draft of anything. Someone tries to make sense of it, and did a pretty good job, mind, but the half-baked idea took off. It caught in our collective minds, giving us hooks to hang things on. But now it’s too ironic for developing really deep understandings of what’s going on.
So here’s my take on the whole web version thing:
In the beginning, Vannevar Bush had an idea. He called it the Memex for memory expander. He published his idea in The Antlantic Monthly. It was a photo-electrical-mechanical device, perhaps a proto-web device. It would insert links between documents (on microfiche), thus between ideas. I’m not sure if one was ever built, but it was really the birth of the web, although perhaps conception is a better point of reference. If you read his paper, As We May Think, you get a feeling of the kinds of insights that are often not possible today, not because there are no possibilities, but because there are so many, and so many changes it is hard to keep up with them.
The Memex is Web0.1! That was 1945.
The next big developments came a while later, in the 1960s. Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext and started to develop Xanadu. Around the same time Doug Engelbart was thinking up NLS for “oNLine System”. NLS required another development – the mouse because his interactive system needed some form of pointing device and all others didn’t seem quite right. I guess he was on to something because the mouse in one form or another is still with us. The idea of point and click interactivity was the merging of these ideas – the mouse, hypertext and NLS.
This is Web0.2!
In the early 80s, Tim Berners-Lee designed a program called ENQUIRE based on a book called “Enquire Within About Everything“, which in some ways sets the path towards search engines, but we’ll get to that later. ENQUIRE was an individualised system for making connections, possibly a prototype wiki.
This is Web0.3.
Later in the 80s, Tim BL was becoming frustrated at the lack of standardised formatting and easily accessible information that people brought with them to CERN. He talks about it here. That’s when he wrote a proposal for Information Management! It’s probably why I have a fascination for that term. It’s what we do with the web.
This is probably Web0.9. I’m sure there were many developments between ENQUIRE and Information Management, but I haven’t seen them documented anywhere. But we’re lucky that Tim was allowed to “play”, because he developed a system called WorldWideWeb which was both read and write in its design, although write only worked locally because HTTP PUT was not yet implemented. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We’re now at Web0.9.1.
1990 saw a year of firsts! The first web server at nxoc01.cern.ch (no longer there), the first web page at http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html now maintained W3C, one of the first web pages, and the least recently modified page (also now located at W3C).
THIS was Web1.0!
By 1992, a new problem was being investigated – how to keep track! The problem definition:
How does www keep track of the available servers? How does a user know where to go to get a specific piece of information? According to the description of the http protocol, when a user wants to do a search, the corresponding UDI specifies, among other things, the server’s address. How does the user find out about the server’s address? Or from the server’s perspective, how does a server announce its existence?
The answer?
In the long term, when there is a really large mass of data out there, with deep interconnections, then there is some really exciting work to be done on automatic algorithms to make multi-level searches.
This is Web1.1. The first problems were solved (sort of), the information was available, we just had to find it.
In 1993, there was a key occurrence which heralded the shift towards the web and away from established processes. This was an announcement by the University of Minnesota: “they would begin to charge licensing fees for Gopher’s use, which caused many volunteers and employees to stop using it and switch to WWW”.
Ironically, that same year, CERN released the W3 software into the public domain (Page 1 and Page 2).
1993 saw the conception of the search engine with Wandex (the World Wide Web Wanderer) and the first full text web search engine, WebCrawler, although it went live in 1994.
(In a parallel history, NSF changed the Acceptable Use Policy of the Internet to allow commercial use.)
Search is Web2.0. This was the beginning of the findable web, a shift from the click and point following of ideas to the beginning of the questioning quest of later web surfing.
1994 also saw the start of W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. This was the beginning of the centralised repository of standardised formatting for Information Management.
In 1996, CSS emerged as a standard. Content and structure were separated as so ably demonstrated by this video – The web is us/ing us. The problem is that if search really is version 2 of the web, then this is version 3. CSS and HTML together is Web3.0.
HTML 4 added tables, scripting, style sheets, internationalization, and accessibility features to Web publishing – Web3.1? That was 1997.
1998 saw XML1.0 with “interoperability and domain-specific markup” with the final recommendation made in 2000 – Could this be Web3.1?
At this point, with so many threads weaving through the web of ideas, I’m going to skip ahead to the main announcements. It almost sounds like pedantic semantics, – after all, who really cares about the numbers? But Sematics, particularly RDF and OWL, were the next big things! Their specifications were released in 2004! I’d call this Web4.0!
2005 saw the the coining of another phrase AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, although the kinds of techniques this enabled had been around for a while (see Wikipedia:AJAX). This is what Tim O’Reilly noticed – a big shift that, for want of a better phrase and with no thought to history, he termed Web2.0, but really it’s starting to look like Web5.0 but nobody was really documenting the changes that were happening, so it’s hardly surprising. This is the read/write web made available for all. This was a big shift and, therefore, noticed by lots of people who are just now coming to terms with it.
But, we haven’t stopped yet. Tim Berners-Lee is proposing Web6.0 – linked data. This is almost a re-thinking of his original proposal, but with more precision. It is another version combining many of the previous shifts but, again, moving us forward. Linked data is built on AJAX which is built on all the previous technologies and all the thinking of all the people who have contributed. You can hear and see Tim’s take on this at TED. Tim’s vision is still clear, almost wiki-like where we all contribute something to this global repository called the World Wide Web.
But it won’t stop there. There will be a Web7.0. I would like to see that working with automatic translations of any page into your chosen language, where the translation process is improved each time by input from the reader, where we can correct grammar and word usage to make sense of things, where everything is available to everyone.
Perhaps by then, we’ll have given up with the numbers.
[...] I waffled on about versions of the web and came to the conclusion that the next *version* would be Web7.0 in which translation processes [...]