By John December and Mark Ginsburg
The State of the World Wide Web
It's the late 1990s, and the World Wide Web is a more complex system for communication than when it was introduced almost a decade ago. Although technically still based on the system of hypertext that Tim Berners-Lee and others developed at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland in the late 1980s, the Web today is more diverse technologically and more diffused within society and culture.
The Technical Expansion of the Web
The range of technologies a Web developer can choose from is now more varied than ever. Besides an array of techniques and tools to shape meaning with HyperText Markup Language (HTML), developers also can use many technologies to add new kinds of multimedia and interactive content to on-line services. New kinds of software to observe Web content are being developed, and the competition for being the provider of Internet software has risen to the highest priority in the personal computer industry.
The range of technologies a Web developer can choose from is now more varied than ever. Besides an array of techniques and tools to shape meaning with HyperText Markup Language (HTML), developers also can use many technologies to add new kinds of multimedia and interactive content to on-line services. New kinds of software to observe Web content are being developed, and the competition for being the provider of Internet software has risen to the highest priority in the personal computer industry.
Whereas the view of the Web in 1989 was a text-based browser deployed on an internal network, today the Web is a global medium that encompasses many software and communications systems across many networks. Within just the years 1995-1996, new kinds of system s emerged that enabled new forms of communications over the Web.