10 Years of the World Wide Web 525
NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today (oh, I guess you could mark time from the 1.0 release, but who's counting), marking the first milestone in the evolution of the graphical World Wide Web. HTTP was originally developed between 1989-1991, but didn't take off until there was a useful browser which could display inline images. You can still download old versions of Mosaic from browsers.evolt.org. So, all you folks who think you have a real handle on technological progress: what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
In 10 more years? (Score:2, Interesting)
2013 (Score:5, Interesting)
Also spam will acount for 99% of all email which will all be in XHTML v9.0 and people will still be trying to get FP on slashdot
Rus
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:2, Interesting)
Even down to the spinning globe that Mosaic had, plus the very useful "clone window" button.
I think the innovations have happened at the back-end: the move away from static content to dynamically generated on-the-fly content.
i'd have to say.. (Score:3, Interesting)
To the 2003 web surfer, I'd have to guess it's going to be strangley, deafeningly mute of spam and popups and junk in general. And if you casually leaned over and asked the 2013 web surfer where the spam went, I bet they'd go "the whuh?" I'll leave it wide open how I'm supposing something like that could happen...
I thought the web was a fad (Score:3, Interesting)
Anybody else see "fad" technologies out there now? Anybody have a guess as to which ones will stick?
The Semantic Web (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I won't say for sure, but I think there is a strong chance that the same man largely responsible for the last ten years could play a role in the evolution over the next ten years as well...
The Semantic Web [scientificamerican.com].
Mosiac, Netscape, and the W3 (Score:4, Interesting)
The first graphical browser I ever used was Mosaic, followed shortly thereafter by Netscape 1.0. This was before the W3 was founded, back in 1993. It's amazing how little the browsers supported back then. No backgrounds, no text colors, no tables, pages looked awful! I remember how blown away I was at the release of Netscape 2.0, which had background support, a stop button, <sub> and <sup> support, LiveScript (which became JavaScript)...and of course the dreaded blink tag.
Although the general look and feel of the browser has not radically changed in a decade or so, the technologies that browsers support have changed drastically. At this point though, I'm just happy I can browse without using IE. I kind of miss the old days, before popups, before animated gifs, before flash & shockwave.
MSN Tech Support SAQ (Score:0, Interesting)
MSN Tech Support
Seldom Asked Questions
General
Q: Who the hell are you and why are you writing this?
A: I'm a level 3 tech, and I'm writing this because some truth needs telling.
Q: Is MSN seperate somehow from Microsoft proper? Sometimes I get that impression talking to the techs.
A: Your impression was correct, but for a very different reason entirely.
The reality is that, except for a very small group of testers (The Microsoft Bench Team, who tell Redmond what kind of calls they receive on the floor as techs, and have no more power to help you than any other agents), the technician you are speaking to does not actually work for Microsoft. Instead, he works for such companies as ACS, Stream, Sykes, and Teleperformance. Under no circumstances will the person you are speaking to reveal that himself; that would get him fired.
Q: WTF? I haven't heard of any of those companies.
A: They're call centers. Instead of actually hiring people to man the phones itself, Microsoft has contracts with other companies. This arrangement is known as outsourcing.
Q: So how much are they getting paid?
A: Lower-level techs make a couple dollars over minimum wage. Tier 3 isn't being paid enough to care, either.
Q: What tools are the technicians using?
A: The primary tool every technician uses is something called PAM, Phoenix Account Management. This, like every other Microsoft product, is poorly programmed with a slow, buggy interface. So when the tech says "Your ticket number is.. uhh..", that tech has just clicked "Save Ticket" but his PAM is being too slow and may not give the ticket number for several seconds.
On the Phone
Q: Is the tech/rep just trying to get me off the phone ASAP? He's getting paid by the hour, right- why should he care?
A: Because he is graded on something called Average Handle Time. The contracts drawn up by Microsoft and the outsourcing companies may vary, and are never shown to the techs on the floor, but one thing is true- it is always less efficient for the outsourcing company for its techs to take long calls. This is passed down to the techs in the form of AHT. Lower-level techs are usually much more concerned with AHT than higher-level ones. This is because higher-level techs are more apt to deal with long, complicated issues, thus their AHT is higher and not focused on quite as much.
Q: Sometimes I get the feeling that there's something the tech really wants to say, but can't.
A: You know how the recording says "This call may be recorded for quality purposes?" It often is. There are many things the technician may not say on the telephone- and if you're speaking to anything less than a level 3 tech, those may include solutions. They have to transfer you to a higher tier for that person to try the fix. You may think that's ridiculous, and it is. The reason hinges on AHT. Similarly, Level 3 agents are not allowed to call the phone companies for DSL issues themselves. Why not? It raises AHT and outbound calls cost money. Never mind what the benefit of that might be to you, the user. You are only a bit player in Microsoft and the outsourcing companies' grandiose play.
Q: I think the tech was a bit perturbed at me. It showed in his voice.
A: You must have really pissed him off. Call-center employees have two things preventing them from sounding angry: a general apathy towards you as a customer, and mental discipline preventing them from showing their emotions over the phone. If the technician shows in any way annoyed with you, he personally, fiercely hates you and would love to beat your head into the ground. Relax; five minutes after he gets off the phone with you, the technician will likely have forgotten who you were, except as a story to tell the other techs.
Of course, if he didn't, your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address are all on his screen. And if it's a hi
Re:Still using it...? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Mosaic was originally free software.
2) A company (Mosaic Spyglass?) was formed to make it into a commercial product.
3) Microsoft, desperate for a browser, licensed Mosaic from that company, on terms that required a certain percentage of the amount made by Microsoft from each browser sale.
4) Microsoft then turned around and gave away the browser, Mosaic's lawyers all slapped their foreheads in collective shock, and Mosaic Spyglass never saw a red cent from the Borg.
Web/Gopher dead-tree directories (Score:5, Interesting)
As useful as the Web has become, I still feel a bit nostalgic for the days when it was ruled by educational institutions, geeks, government agencies and porn. Life without banners....ahhh :)
Bah! It's just Gopher with pictures. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow been that long? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember when nobody had pop-up ads, and when the banner ad thing first started. Remember the original link exchange rings? Also remember what kind of sites had them? No reputable site would dare have a banner on it!
The no frames movement? Hey that one actually succeeded more or less! Of course it helped that frames where outdated by tables and eventually style sheets of various forms, lol!
I remember when the "Next Big Thing" was VRML. I also remember how buggy the VRML players where. It was crazy, the Japanese did have a few good VRML attractions though.
Best of all I remember being able to do a web search for *COUGH* not so legal *COUGH* applications and not coming up with a ton of porn sites! Heya imagine that! lol
Of course I also remember doing insanely complicated regular expression searches just to FIND any data. Search engines sucked to such a large degree back then it wasn't even funny. And there also was not nearly so much information on the Internet, though there tended to be a lot more net culture history around. Anybody else here remember the BERMs VS Nerds thing that was the hot debate topic for the longest time?
I remember the original incarnation of weird.com [weird.com] and of givememoney.com (now a squatters domain)
Send your Cash, Check, or Valuables to:
Some Homeless Guy New York New York. . .
*sigh*
Geocities used to be the somewhat lame but legit web host with domain names that where far to long. Crosswinds.net was the little known quality free hosting service. Tripod.com was the somewhat smaller competitor to Geocities.
And Gamespy used to be an APPLICATION not some huge multinational corporation. Hehehehe. Damn that is funny, looking at how far Gamespy has come, LOL! I never even really did like their product! Oh well, hehe. Hey Fragmaster, you rock!
Jeez, then the
But. . .
*sigh*
Same old web, just a ton more banner ads. But hey, now there is a banner ad size standardization group! Some days I think that is all the web ended up getting out of the
first chatroom (Score:4, Interesting)
for me it was like suddenly a moment of transcendance when I first realized what the internet was capable of, and that I could actually directly talk to multiple people all over the world.
I remember emailing random people just because it was so cool and easy. (Now I'd be arrested for spamming...)
I wonder what our kids will think of it, having always had it...
My pessimistic take on this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
I use it quite a bit for network programming because it is easier to control than a normal browser in that it doesn't do *anything* automatically - it won't even follow redirects unless you allow it explicitly. This is a very useful feature if you are trying to closely follow interactions with a web site.
I agree with you in that Lynx just doesn't cut the mustard for ordinary surfing (that's not really what it's designed to do). I just don't want folks to get the idea that it's outdated or otherwise useless.
I love lynx.
Re:Innovations I like (Score:4, Interesting)
I live and dye by mine. I cannot stand switching to other browsers and catching myself doing a mouse gesture that does nothing. I find it really helpful when doing research and I am hopping from one page to another. Very nice addition to your list cuz that is just what I was thinking of.
What I Think Will Happen To Browsers By 2013. (Score:5, Interesting)
My thought is, the conventional web browser will eventually be replaced by something I like to refer to as a "metabrowser"... In other words, we don't really actively *surf* anymore, but rather, we swim through a series of content-rich pages generated by the browser itself, based on information transparently gathered from actual sources behind the scenes, and appearing in a format that I like to see things in. I don't want to see something prepared in a format someone else likes. I want to see it how I like it.
How is this going to be accomplished? Well, take Google as a crude engine model. For any particular subject you search for on Google, the top 5 or so pages that Google suggests to you carry (on average) about 40% of the total information payload you're looking for. The sort of searches you embark on have usually been done by hundreds of people before you. If there was a way to earmark at-a-glance how useful a particular piece of information is, then you could begin ranking specific *reigons* of content, not simply the pages themselves. Think of a browser with a highlighter pen. Wherever you go, you can use the highlighter pen to say "this is useful, the rest is crap", and that annotation (as well as the aggregate of other peoples annotations) are stored along with the document. When viewed from this perspective, irrelevant information falls into obscurity while important information rises to the top.
A metabrowser's task is to compile only that *useful* information, based on those annotations made by others in the past, combined with your own preferences. Think of it as a P2P utility for search parameters. What worked for you is shared amongst thousands of other people. Its not so much the page itself anymore, but what hotspots of that page are useful. Web browsers in 2003 are just machines for extracting the ore out of a mine. I want a device that extracts ore, refines it, and poops out a gold brick within 10 seconds.
I also see the possibility of "temporal browsing", i.e. you can see what Slashdot looks like today, yesterday, or back on February 19th '06 if you want. Why not? So much data just spills into oblivion for no reason, why not find a way to keep it around? Why not store webpage content the same way frames of a movie are stored, simply as a delta of the last keyframe?
I want to be able to "drill down" in a webpage to find the origin of a particular piece of information. I don't want to take 31337 h4x0r b0y's word for it.
Massive amounts of content are meaningless without a proper way of indexing it all. We need to build bindings. Everywhere.
Or Mozilla (Score:2, Interesting)
As more and more people learn that you can turn off pop-up adds in Mozilla, it will start to gain more and more market share. A free browser that adheres to the standards without pop-ups... what more could you want? (Well, maybe Opera)
I see browsers looking more and more like applications (as a web application developer, I would love to see the ability to create a modal dialog window that required input and would return focus back to the parent window). Of course, IE will always have extra "features" and Netscape will be picky as all getout, so in another ten years, it will still be a major pain to develop websites on the web... unless, of course, Mozilla takes over everything. :-)
Re:Obviously plagarized (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What if Netscape won? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the author states that we'd all be using on-line apps instead of an OS. That is more BS. Until everyone has broadband, it is more efficient to use programs that load off-line.
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:1, Interesting)
That's a really good point. I am doing a lot of research in to web design and how to make it as usable as possible. It seems that a lot of the conventions we follow are just that - conventions. Most sites that are easiest to use follow principles that we simply got used to by using the first popular version of something.
I commend the NCSA for setting such wonderful standards that, like you say, have stuck with us for the past ten years and show no signs of being forgotten.
How about Stop button? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mot an unmixed blessing...
The document object modelGood point.
PNG supportNot exactly a major achievement.
Frames supportActually, I think frames were one of the worst things that got done to the HTML standard, the concept bends the web paradigm.
Embedable multimediaIf you mean Flash, then I really disagree. Flash is the worst thing to happen to the web. Flash entirely breaks the web paradigm.
If you mean embedable movies (and stuff), I'm not convinced I agree here either, it restricts the user with respect to the applications they use and alot of teh time make it frustratingly hard to actually download the content ratehr than watch it "online".
Plugin supportTrue, alhtough haven't Microsoft now gotten rid of this in their latest generation of browsers? Don't know for sure as I haven't used IE in several years.
CookiesCookies were a half decent idea, we needed to do something to get persistant states, but they've been used for evil and now must die.
HTTPS SupportHardly an inovation, enrypting something isn't innovative.
Cascading Style SheetsThe best thing to the web in years, just wish all the browsers would finally support it in the same way.
XHTML TranslationsHmm...
XML SupportWell, okay, but its not really fully supported yet, is it?
ThemesHo hum...
Integrated Mail and NewsBad, clunky and graphical. Why would you want to read news or mail inside a GUI? They're fundamentally text based media?
Personally my life has become much easier now my mail server auto-rejects all HTML formatted email before I see it. HTML email is an abomination...
(imperfect) W3C Standards supportSurely that shoul have been at the top of the list? Standards support should come before everything else. If we don't have standards, its bloody hard for software to tak to other bits of software, let alone to humans.
Browsers have progressed tremendously in the last 10 years, but mostly in ways that are not immediately visible to a layman...
I think what people are commenting on is that its been fairly slow incremental change, the sort of paradigm shifts that occured early on in teh webs life haven't occured again. For instance I'm sure alot of people (including me) are wondering why the Semantic Web never really took off...
That said the - the progress has mostly been in enabling support for various things, although significant progress has also been made in design and usability.
Right, incremental changes. I think that the GRID might shake things up a bit in the next couple of years, although since I'm working of GRID-enabled stuff I might have a somewhat skewed view of whats going on...
Al.Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What if Netscape won? (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it. if netscape had won, crushing IE and becoming dominat, what would stop them from switching back to a for pay software company, actually making money of their product...
And people don't like to pay for new versions too often... so, there'd be fewer innovations, far less growth of the product... just patches.
Oh sure, there'd be better adherance to standards, but think of the loss the OSS community would suffer it it hadn't been for the development of Mozilla, born from netscapes collapse.
Mozilla is one of those projects that affects the most number of people... and promotes at least some awareness of the choice that OSS brings to the table... (Linux, while a great bringer of zealots, just doesn't quite cut it with most folks.. getting closer though, getting a lot closer)
ah well, just pulling "what if's" out of my ass here... I could be compleatly wrong.
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:3, Interesting)
GRID? More info please.
The GRID? Hmm, its sort of, well, its something like...
To be honest nobody is really sure what it is yet. In academia is sort of viewed as the next generation internet, some people are deploying hardware (mostly the particle physicists to cope with their anticipated huge bandwidth needs) the rest of us are writing software to do distributed computing. You know the sort of thing, your data is spread across a bunch of machines in the States and the Caymen Islands (for instance) and you don't really want to shift it over the network to you do things to is, so you shift it somewhere else entirely, they do things to it , and the (hopefully) smaller results end up on your desktop.
Hmm, links, how about the Globus Project
, although to be honest I don't think much of the stability of Globus and all my projects are migrating to SOAP, but the site does give you some background of GRIDs and stuff. Al.Moasic was 'the next NCSA Telnet' (Score:3, Interesting)
At the time, NCSA Telnet had been the Center's big contribution to the Internet and a huge one at that. In the mid-'80s before NCSA Telnet, no one had dreamed of using a PC or Mac to directly access resources (like supercomputers) on the 'Net... It just wasn't done. MIT's PC/IP came out about the same time but I don't think it saw nearly same distribution as NCSA Telnet in the early years... NCSA Telnet was the client almost everyone used on "little machines."
Now ten years later, how many folks know what NCSA Telnet was, let alone recall it's impact? Talk about differences in scale...
--zawada
want to see? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at how most humans learn,and how we continue as adults to communicate, starting as children, voice and body language is what is learned first, reading comes later. We need to be able to talk to the boxes, the boxes talk to each other, and web browsers will be that deal that links it all together. The work and play we do will be controlled by our voices, like it is now.
Coincidence? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that a cool coincidence or what? Must be something special about March 14th.
Here's an interesting site [scopesys.com] of other events that happened today in history. Among them I found the following interesting:
TODAY IS ALSO THE RIAA's BIRTHDAY!! HOW SCARRY!!
1958 RIAA (Recording Industry Association of American)is created and certifies 1st gold record (Perry Como's Catch A Falling Star)
1950 FBI's "10 Most Wanted Fugitives" program begins
1967 JFK's body moved from temporary grave to a permanent memorial
1971 The Rolling Stones leave England for France to escape taxes
1995 1st time 13 people in space
1997 President Clinton trips & tears up his knee requiring surgery
The child has grown (Score:4, Interesting)
It could grow in width, reaching everywhere with appliances, internet enabled dispositives, ipv6 addresses even for your pencil, all enabled to access by voice, touch(for screens and things like that) and maybe more. I don't think that in 10 year we'll have holographic screens for clocks, a la Final Fantasy or Spy Kids 2, but is a nice goal.
It could grow in depth. Have a big amount of content, but is still far from having "everything" know by man, in every language, in every media.
And it could grow mature in other ways, being more self consistent, more consolidated. I think that will not be so far something that give a consolidated view of the web, something like data warehousing do for complex databases, but for the more complex database of all.
Directories like yahoo did a first step, so the same did the first search engines. Google advanced a bit more, consilidating a bit the web giving weight to more linked things. But there still a lot of work to do in that direction, something that answer my mostly free form questions not giving me a collection of links that could talk about what I'm searching for, but an answer, something really like the old oracle, but for now and mostly for real.
The last part is what I see more probable for the next years, still a lot needs to be developed, but there is a more or less clear path to reach it, search engines already have a big chunk of the www to start, and some legislation maybe will be needed (extractind data from web pages for that of things will be very similar to screen scraping).
Of course, all of this could happen if nothing avoid this, like war, global economic problems, patents and IP in general don't put obstacles, famine, diseases, extintion levels events or Microsoft.
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft did _announce_ Windows 1.0 almost twenty years ago (fall 1983). They shipped no product until nearly a year later. And Windows 1.0 is not at all "pretty much unchanged in over 20 years." For example, overlapping windows was a pretty big change.
Apple had a shipping product in January 1983, the LISA. And anothe shipping product, the Macintosh, which Microsoft had to license in 1985, before Microsoft could come up with a usable product.
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:2, Interesting)
Now, I didn't say it would be pretty.
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:2, Interesting)
Just curious, why companies like Apollo with Mentor Graphics s/w is never mentioned in these discussions. I remember attending Mentor Graphics training classes ( Apr. 1984?) with a flow blown windowing system, touch pad (fingernail?) mouse.
sinan
Re:Yes, brilliant, wasn't it? (Score:3, Interesting)
But Wordstar, and Wordperfect, and Wang word processing before that (which was arguably superior to either of them) all fell into the same mould: they were designed for fixed-pitch, monospaced, daisywheel output. And it would be better to describe them as having an integrated full-screen text editor than as having a WYSIWYG display. I was never a Wordstar user but if I recall correctly it even relied on significant usage of RUNOFF-like dot commands that you needed to know, and which were visible onscreen.
Microsoft Word broke that mould. It derived its heritage from, um, what WAS it called? Bravo? on the Alto. Its design center assumed multiple typefaces, proportionally spaced fonts, and full-bore true WYSIWYG screen displays.
And it separated structure from appearance and introduced style sheets.
It didn't make much impact when it was introduced in 1983. People couldn't figure it out right away. Why would you want all that stuff? It was just going to slow down screen drawing. In 1983, people were still excited about systems that could produce boldface on daisywheels by shifting the wheel 1/120th of an inch AND could show you bold on the screen by intensifying the display.
The idea that you would want to see italics as italic was utterly alien to most users at the time.
There was prehistory, notably Bravo, but, once again, Microsoft Word put ALL that stuff together into a real, usable, product that was dramatically different from anything else available at the time and got most of the important stuff right.
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:10 years... So similiar... (Score:1, Interesting)
Did ya think I was lying? And I didn't say it would be pretty, either.
MOSAIC was NOT 1st (Score:3, Interesting)
MOSAIC was promoted as the 1st graphical browser but that is factually wrong. I wasnt even the first major browser. Mosaic came years after the WWW