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
It will take forever for the 3d holograms to load over a broadband cable connection. Also, the psychic popup ads will be a real pain....
itll be all programs for downloading and creating your very own woman using your biowheel printer.
Ok, a man can dream, cant he?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
My NeXT was running web clients in 1991 or 1992. Not much to see, if you didn't put it up.
Mosaic was a milestone, but it didn't mark the start line.
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
what will information-access-over-electronic-networks look like in 2013?
:(
Television
My first was using Lynx through telnet to a local community college... ... the porn sucked.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Er, you mean , right?
Doesn't work in IE, works in Moz though...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Game... blouses.
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
The current "computer industry" doesn't see the web as an application development enviornment. They see it as an advertising/marketing showplace. Some people (education/individuals/orgs) see it as an information sharing and collecting service (which is what www was supposed to be). However the only new thing that I've seen that made me go "hey, that's pretty nifty, and sort of new" has been the advent of "Web Services" such as XML based applications like Watson and now Sherlock 3 from Apple. Where content is pulled from a source but the source isn't exactly all planned out. It's annoying to have to look at some websites that are just flash animations and pretty fonts that look like scribblings of a demented 4 year old. I want the info, the words that mean something, the movie clip, the data. I don't want your love of the color puce to make me want to retch when I'm trying to look up a flight time, or read and article (web designers, take note, you know who you are, and I hate you because of it).
We should be using the web more as a resource for storing and retrieving data. Graphics and pretty page layouts are nice and all but if I could, I'd abolish most of it and just look for a summary of the info with a little link saying "Want to know more? Click here..."
Blarg.
It's the data.
It's all about the data.
Information wants to be in your pants.
In Soviet Russia, the pants are in the hot grits.
Bleh.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
The first browser was called WorldWideWeb, more info where. His first release was in Christmas 1990. So, the World Wide Web is 12 years old.
I hope that someone realizes that using "www" with 9 syllables is a silly way to abbreviate "world wide web" with 3.
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?
It will look like CowboyNeal!!
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
When I remember how excited everybody got with the introducion of the <CENTER> tag
Every damn page became centered overnight.
And the day the <BLINK> tag first made an entry, I wanted to go shoot a large hoarde of web "designers".
Each time a new advance was made, there was always a bunch of people who never learnt the rule - "Just because you can doesn't mean you should".
I think they design Flash web sites now.
My prediction is that they'll still be doing whatever the equivalent is in 2013 :)
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
There was a text-based browser before Mosaic, written at CERN and called www. That's the earliest web browser. I even remember using on a shell account in 1992 or so, though an early version of Lynx was available as well.
In the interests of Internet history, I'd like to see www. It should be able to run fine on a Linux system, as it's a simple line-based program. However, I haven't been able to find a copy, as browsers.evolt.org doesn't go back that far. Does anyone have the source?
Microsoft has left IE virtually unchanged for quite a while, because they don't need put any effort into it anymore. They have a 70-80% market share that isn't going anywhere quickly so why bother?
IE does not has not moved an inch standards wise since IE 4, so "new" things like XHTML are not supported and only work because IE will support virtually any markup. Just try using a correct XHTML MIME type, or using XHTML DOM (which is read-only in XHTML) or CSS (changes to case rules in XHTML) in IE and it will fail. Mozilla and Opera (and no doubt Konq also) do all the above just fine.
Maybe they will do tabbed browsing to stop people saying it is behind for features, maybe they will gruddingly to pop-up blockers, or maybe they will just keep the ad revenue from MSN.
Until MS update IE the web stays looking just as it does now for 70-80% of users, however innovative the rest of the world gets.
DWR is Ajax for Java
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
The english language is not static. It can, will and some would say, MUST change based on usage. Language is meant to communicate quickly and clearly. When a certain letter 'double you' is said outloud over and over, it will get abreviated.
The real question is wether the prounciation of the letter will change in common usage. As noted elsewhere, 'w' is the only 3 syllable letter in the english language, all others are single syllable. In fact all other letters are pronounced as vowel-consonent or consonent-vowel. Since 'you' is already a letter, and w's now look more like double v's than double u's, my guess is that 'dub' and eventually 'duh' will replace 'double you' in the long term. The advent of the 9 syllable 3 letter acronym as a catalyst for this change in pronunciation can bee seen already.
So my prediction for 10 years from now? The whole world changes to a environmentalist green paradise with no machines or computers or internet. The only lasting remains? The pronunciation of the letter 'w' in the english language has changed to 'duh'. This is to remind us all how stupid the dot-com boom was.
I still remember the very first time I saw Mosaic: I was at a computer lab and a friend just told me about this "cool" thing that just came out. Needless to say, me being a geek and all, it took me only 5 minutes later to create my first web page (back then, HTML was *ultra* simple). I also vividly remember saying to my friend "this is the future of the Internet".
I actually remember that at one point it was possible to view *ALL* the websites on the planet (tell that to the younger generation today!), and how every single day was very exciting to discover new things (the birth of yahoo, altavista, ebay, and amazon come to mind).
That day I saw mosaic is on my list of days I could never forget, like the challenger explossion, the berlin wall coming down, the wall trade center attacks, and recently the columbia tragedy...