Abstract :
The World Wide Web (WWW) has become, next to electronic mail, the most popular Internet application. It has been a major contributor in turning the Internet into a household word. The WWW allows users to retrieve text and multimedia objects from servers located throughout the world, with objects connected by hypermedia links. The author presents a snapshot of the WWW after about half a decade, and speculates about where this young medium might be improved and which directions it might take from a technical perspective. Like most (successful) Internet technologies, the underlying central functionality of the Web is rather simple: a naming mechanism for files (the universal resource locator, URL), a typed, stateless retrieval protocol (hypertext transfer protocol, HTTP), and a minimal formatting language with hyperlinks (hypertext markup language, HTML)
Keywords :
Internet; hypermedia; information retrieval; protocols; HTML; HTTP; Internet application; URL; World Wide Web; files; hypermedia links; hypertext markup language; hypertext transfer protocol; minimal formatting language; multimedia objects retrieval; naming mechanism; servers; text retrieval; typed stateless retrieval protocol; universal resource locator; Electronic mail; HTML; Internet; Markup languages; Protocols; Turning; Uniform resource locators; Web server; Web sites; World Wide Web;
