Slashdot Mirror
10 Years of the World Wide Web
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?
Wow.. After downloading and looking at "NCSA MOSIAC FOR MS WINDOWS" it's amazing how LITTLE the browser has changed..
All major innovations, such as URL bar, Forward/Back buttons, reload and home buttons, as well as bookmarks are allready in place. It even has a Search bar!
90% of the "features" of a browser haven't changed in the last 10 years.. It really makes you wonder how often people re-think an interface, or if they just use and evolve what they are used to.
I'm honestly curious, what major innovations have we seen?
Snapback [Apple Safari]
Tabbed browsing, and related enhancements (such as Open a group of tabs) [Mozilla, etc]
Umm.....?
One other feature I found interesting is that in NCSA Mosaic, there was a "annotate" function.. Presumably this let people add to a page, if the server were set properly, almost like a WIKI situation?
Did anyone ever work with this?
Colin Davis
I know what I would like to see in that we are all on internet2 living in a free society however I think what we might actually have is that everyones 10GB fibre optic links which will be saturated by people streaming porn onto the 3d holographic projectors and pop-ups will be sales men who literally pop up.
:)
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
Anybody else see "fad" technologies out there now? Anybody have a guess as to which ones will stick?
There's a story behind that. As far as I recall without the help of Google...
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.
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 :)
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
I've only been on the web 8 years but shoot, I remember seeing a ton of changes in just that relatively short time.
.
:)
.com boom hit and everything went down the tube. We all kept on hoping that the "Next Big Thing" would come forth from it and we put up with all the B.S. that the bean counters brought in, always waiting for something new to emerge from these new gigantically funded companies.
.
.com boom. . . .
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 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
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Do you remember the first time you were ever in a chat room?
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...
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Mouse gestures - I don't use them very often because I prefer radial context menus, but I know people who can't live without them. Very cool.
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.
By 2013, I *hope* we will do away with browsers. Literally.
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.
Bowie J. Poag
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.