Introduction
to Dynamic Web Content
v The
World Wide Web is a constantly evolving network that has already traveled far
beyond its conception in the early 1990s when it was created to solve a
specific problem. State-of-the-art experiments at CERN (the European Laboratory
for Particle Physics, now best known as the operator of the Large Hadrons
Collider) were producing incredible amounts of data—so much that the data was
proving unwieldy to distribute to the participating scientists, who were spread
out across the world.
v At
this time, the internet was already in place, connecting several hundred
thousand computers, so Tim Berners-Lee (a CERN fellow) devised a method of
navigating between them using a hyperlinking framework, which came to be known
as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. He also created a markup language
called Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. To bring these together, he wrote
the first web browser and the web server.
today we take these tools for granted, but back then, the concept was revolutionary.
The most connectivity so far experienced by at-home modem users was dialing up
and connecting to a bulletin board that was hosted by a single computer, where
you could communicate and swap data only with other users of that service. Cones‐
queenly, you needed to be a member of many bulletin board systems to effectively communicate electronically with your colleagues and friends.
v But Berners-Lee changed that entire in one fell swoop, and by the mid-1990s, three major graphical web browsers were competing for the attention of 5 million users. It soon became obvious, though, that something was missing. Yes, pages of text and graphics with hyperlinks to take you to other pages were a brilliant concept, but the results didn’t reflect the instantaneous potential of computers and the internet to meet the particular needs of each user with dynamically changing content. Using the web was a very dry and plain experience, even if we did now have scrolling text and animated GIFs.
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