What exactly is the WEB?
It seems like a stupid question because we all know the answer: the web is the thing Tim Berners-Lee invented in 1989.
It’s not the same thing as “the Internet” (as we saw in the previous article), which is what we use to access the web, apps, and streaming video. It’s what we visit every day with our web browsers on our phones and laptops.
Simple, right?
Well, no. Traditionally, we think of the web as a combination of a set of specific technologies paired with some core philosophical principles. The problem — the reason this question even matters — is that there are a lot of potential replacements for the parts of the web that fix what’s broken with technology, while undermining the principles that ought to go with it.
How it all begun…
In 1989 the world wide web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He was trying to find a new way for scientists to easily share the data from their experiments.
Hypertext and the internet already existed at this point but no one had thought of a way to use the internet to link one document directly to another.
Tim suggested three main technologies that meant all computers could understand each other (HTML, URL and HTTP). All of these remain in use today.
He also made the world’s first web browser and web server. You can still see pages from the first web server online.
It’s all about “Languages”
The tech you think of as “the Web” is HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (For simplicity, I’ll just refer to it at the “HTML stack.”). Those technologies are so open and flexible that they’ve taken over the world.
The Web consists of pages that can be accessed using a Web browser. The Internet is the actual network of networks where all the information resides. Things like Telnet, FTP, Internet gaming, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and e-mail are all part of the Internet, but are not part of the World Wide Web.
The Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the method used to transfer Web pages to your computer. With hypertext, a word or phrase can contain a link to another Web site. All Web pages are written in the hyper-text markup language (HTML), which works in conjunction with HTTP.
In sum, we can all agree that to count as being part of the web, your app or page must:
1. Be linkable, and
2. Allow any client to access it.
That’s it.
Okay, not really. There are a lot of details to get into here, specifically with the second point. But let’s tackle the first, because it’s easy. Whatever it is you’re publishing should be linkable: it should have a URL that other things can point to.
But links aren’t the complicated part; it’s the part where your thing should allow any client to access it. For the web, that rule is pretty clear: whether you use Chrome or Safari or Edge or Opera or whatever, when you click a link or type in a URL, you get the page you wanted (more or less). Those pages are agnostic to the client.
That agnosticism isn’t easy; it’s driven by web standards and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) organization that crafts them. They have periodically been problematic as this or that browser becomes popular and the company behind it encourages web developers to code specifically to their browser (Internet Explorer 6, Mobile Safari, Chrome), but those issues have tended to resolve themselves over time.
When people talk about the “open web,” agnosticism to the client is really at the heart of it. A page or app may be free and linkable, but if it only works on specifically proscribed platforms (iOS, Android, Facebook, Chrome), it’s not really open.
So you can run through all the web-like things in that list above, look at that two-part test, and just say straight up that these things don’t count as part of the open web.
For instance Android Instant Apps: only work on Android. Not the web. Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News: pay no attention to their weird URL redirecting and HTML code, they only work on their respective platforms. Not the web.
It can get messy, though, especially with technologies like Instant Articles or AMP. Particularly AMP, which is build on a subset of the same HTML stack that powers the web. Any normal web browser can view an AMP page, so, as a technology to supplant the traditional full HTML stack, AMP seems promising. But it’s tricky. The only reason that works is thanks to Google’s largess. Setting aside how AMP’s URL scheme and core business case can be problematic, the real issue for AMP being part of the web is that Google defines the terms of what does and doesn’t work on AMP and could limit it whenever it likes.
The question is whether any technology with specs that are solely defined by a single company can truly be trusted to be agnostic to the client. Sure, Google has been good for the web (or, better stated, vice versa), but that’s no guarantee it won’t undercut it if it’s profitable. Instant Android apps and custom app indexing are just two ways that the company is hedging its web bets.
WEB and openness
Speaking of questions, I’ll re-pose one from earlier: who cares?
Well, we should all do.
The openness of the web allowed small companies to become big ones without seeking permission from the biggest ones. Preserving the web, or more specifically the open principles behind it, means protecting one of the few paths for innovation left in the modern tech world that doesn’t have a giant company acting as a gatekeeper. And there’s reason not to trust those giant companies: there’s much less incentive to encourage openness when you have a massive empire to defend.
Not everything has to be as open as the web, but some things should be.
As we gear up to argue about net neutrality, it’s worth remembering that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) aren’t the only gatekeepers on the internet. I don’t have anything against apps or proprietary services. I use them every day.
Many of them look like the web and work like the web.
But they’re not the web
Still confused? Let’s sum up …
The system we know today as “the Web” consists of several components:
- The HTTP protocol governs data transfer between a server and a client.
- To access a Web component, a client supplies a unique universal identifier, called a URL (uniform resource locator) or URI (uniform resource identifier) (formally called Universal Document Identifier (UDI)).
- HTML (hypertext markup language) is the most common format for publishing web documents.
The Web in World Wide Web is not referring to a web of connected computers, but a web of information connected by hyperlinks —a collection of connected documents.
The linked network of computers, the Internet, is the base upon which the Web has been built and we depend on the Internet to give us access to that Web and allow us to add to it. Without the Internet, there is no World Wide Web. That being said, the Web is the most popular part of the Internet, so its easy to see why the average person considers the terms to be synonymous.
Tim Berners-Lee goal was to make the Internet accessible to everyone
by facilitating the access, creation and spread of information, think about nowadays: most businesses conduct at least some part of their operations online, most people use the Web for everyday aspects of life, such as checking bank balances, accessing work documents from home, donating to political campaigns or charities, and listening to music.
The Web also has fueled growth in the global economy, creating new industries that profit by controlling and distributing information rather than manufacturing goods. Much like railroads and electricity in the late nineteenth century,
the Web has created a new economic era.
End of Part 2
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