Today i was suppose to read for my test on Wednesday but i came across the book - weaving the web by internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee and started to read. This is unusual activity for me, reading but the topic is one that i am fascinated in. I like the idea of the internet and this was more like an opportunity to learn and heed to my mom's advice in her email - study, study, study.
I won't go through all 14 chapters of the book only highlight some of the parts i find important. Tim was the son of two mathematicians. His parents were part of the team that built one of the first computers and from a young age he has been fascinated by the idea of links. You know like how your brain can transport you to a different time and link information together when you for example smell something. For me when i listen to in awe of you by hillsongs i'm immediately reminded of the time i used to borrow mike's cd player and play the song in my room over and over all night. That was way back in pleasant courts. What makes these memories possible are the cells in our brains that make the necessary connection, links.
He wanted to create something that would show this inherent relationship so he wrote a program called enquire that made links of documents and saved their relationships without using a database or a matrix. The links were both internal {within a document} and external {between documents}. For me the mere possibility of doing this is intriguing especially now that i'm learning about datastructures where we basically deal with different forms of sorting, storing, editing data in a way that is persistent. And the simplest form of storage would be an array but here i'm not sure what datastructure he used to achieve his feat.
The first web server he wrote ran on a NeXT machine. NeXT was the company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 when he resigned from Apple computers. The server name was info.cern.ch and was hosted in CERN {Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire} which lies along the French-Swiss border.
The idea of unversality was key to the internet. The system should not constrain the user.
There was no central computer "controlling" the web, no single network on which
these protocols worked, not even an organisation anywhere that "ran" the web.
The web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain "place". It
was a "space" in which information could exist.
ZIP Ccodes And URIsZIP codes consists of a 5digit number. The first three numbers designate a certain a certain geographic region - a town, or part of a city or county. The next two define a very specific part of that region - say a few square blocks in a city. This gets the mail to the local post office and carriers from there use street name or box numbers to finish the routing.
For URIs or Universal Resource Identifiers AKA URLs the slashes part are used in a URI to separate its parts. The first few letters tell the browser which protocol to use to look the document whether HTTP {HyperText Transfer Protocol} or FTP {File Transfer Protocol}. So for example in the address
http://www.friendster.com/ogucci, the
www.friendster.com part indentifiers the computer server where these documents exist, ogucci is a specified document, in this case my profile page.
The big difference between URIs and postal addresses is that the last part of of the URI can mean whatever the server wants it to mean. The client {your browser} never tries to figure out what it mean, it just asks for it. From this there lies and obvious chaotic situation where all kinds of documents will be served to client machines so there was a need for a common formatting standard for web documents hence HTML.
The philosophy rule of HTML {HyperText Markup Language} was that HTML should convey the structure of a hypertext document {A document with links, both internal and external} but not details of its presentation.
He revealed that HTML source codes were not intended to be viewed by the user and the idea of asking people to write angle brackets
< b > for example was like asking someone to write a Microsoft word document in binary code format. His idea of a web browser was one that would both view and create internet content just as easy as it is to type a word document but few people shared this interest.
From his story i saw an uncomfortable relationship between getting something, especially a relatively new idea accepted in its true form as a very difficult undertaking. A lot of compromises have to be made along the way that dilutes the pure idea and lives it with barebones. This is perhaps the most frustrating thing about software engineering and inventions in general.
One quote that stuck me that i'm glad i know now is this one by Phil Gross. "Things
can get picked up quickly on the internet, but they can get dropped quickly, too".
Here is one man who had an idea, that changed the world. One that stayed with him all through his undergraduate years and eventually led him to his present position on the board of advisers for the World Wide Web Consortium that oversees the general direction the web is taking. I'm also reminded of
Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us who had loads of bookmarks and needed a way to manage them and access them from any computer anywhere in the world so he built a system that is today solving the problem of many people myself included with the ability to share and discover new sites and links. It just goes to show the pattern in inventions - necessity.
It was nice to see the origins of our intricately connected world, right from the first computers, through the birth of Java and the browser was of 1995/1996 and how new MarkUp languages have been introduced from the basic HTML which is still in use today.
I've not finished reading the book yet. I've only done 9 of the 12 chapters and i intend on finishing the book tonight hopefully. I'm not sure if this is the right place to talk about my tech stuff but i want to make this blog more than just a personal blog.
~shalom~
