Internet history & overview

Internet — network of networks, connected to public backbone, with comms over TCP/IP

• started in late 1960 s as ARPANET
• email was one of the first features (7972)
• only a military thing
• then, universities, in NSFNET
  • NL was the first non-US country!

Internet governance is held by:

• IETF (internet engineering task force)
  • develops standards
  • anyone can participate
• IANA/ICANN, W3C

World Wide Web: a collection of machines providing information via HTTP

• invented at CERN, 1989, by Tim Bernerns-Lee
• goal: simplify sharing research results over internet
• originally competed with WAIS, Gopher, ARCHIE
• distinctive features:
  • locating documents with URLs (uniform resource locators)
  • document representation in HTML
  • communication over HTTP
• web browsers are used by clients to
  • convert URLs to HTTP requests
  • communicate with web servers via HTTP/TCP/IP
  • render documents returned by web server
  • additional features: scripts, events, GUI, security, plugins

Content markup (HTML)

• what role a piece of content plays in document
• semantic
• “what”, not “how”

Style markup (CSS)

• how content should be presented
• includes format stuff like screen size