Reddit reviews Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web

The internet isn't a specific 'thing'; there is no internet box that you can point to and say, "that's the internet!" The internet is an abstract term applied to a series of computer networks of an indeterminate number greater than one. This is important because prior to the networking of two distinct networks together, you only had two distinct, non-communicating networks.

There is a varying level of redundancy in the connections between the various networks, all with one specific thing in common these days: the TCP/IP internet protocol suite. It was the best way of allowing for common communication between distinct computer networks.

If you visualize a long line -- a wire -- and then envision computer networks connecting to it via servers and more wire, you're envision what the internet is at a basic, broad level. There is a great video on YouTube that explains the internet this way. I'm trying to locate it now. However, if you enjoy reading about such things, there are two fantastic books that I recommend on the subject:

1. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
   
   
2. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web
   
   The former explores the history of the internet, taken as a summation of its parts and their creation. The latter explores the origins (and potential futures) of the World Wide Web, a specific application of hosting and sharing documents (and other media) across the internet conveniently. It's written by Tim Berners-Lee, the number one scientist behind its creation. I include this link because it is a common misconception that "the internet" is "the world wide web."

Something less code-y: Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. For those of us young enough to not have been a part of the early days of the web, it's nice to have some perspective on the history of it.

The military (mil spec manuals) was one of the primary drivers & advocates of the development of the SGML system.

And again, HTML was a subset (initially very crude & limited functionality) of it -- which, among other things, allowed the leveraging of various (already existing) parsing algorithms.

That really DOESN'T lessen the "great achievement" status of Timothy Berners-Lee (the so called -- and not entirely inaccurately so -- "inventor" of the "world wide web") work -- which was really more the creation and distribution of a combination of tools, and perhaps most importantly "giving it away" -- openly/freely sharing the specs: the http protocol (based on other internet protocols, but again simplified, initially all it did was a "GET" request), along with a small footprint ("web/http") server application, and the first (text only "web") browser application.

Several Many others had TRIED to craft "hypertext" (i.e. user editable text/documents with click-able "links" or regions) systems -- protocols and the accompanying server/viewer application sets -- but they all failed or fell short of wide adoption for a number of reasons (some of them for being to simplistic, others for being too complex, and most for being "commercial/proprietary" and working only on specific platforms).

BTW, if you can lay your hands on it, TBL's book "Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web" is well worth the read, and is not only interesting from a technical and historical perspective, but also to see what his original "vision" was, and how that has been both fulfilled, and on the other hand in some ways went unfulfilled (or even subverted) as the web actually developed and grew.

It's not that complicated, really.

• Uniform Resource Identifiers identify resources
  
• Uniform Resource Locators locate resources
  
• Uniform Resource Names name resources (using names from other standards)
  
  One way of identifying a resource is to specify its location (i.e. point to where it is). Another way is to specify its name. Therefore, locations and names are kinds of identifiers.
  
  If you deal with the workings of the Web a lot, it's really worth trying to understand Tim Berners-Lee's mindset. I definitely recommend urn:isbn:006251587X ;-)

_5. Read 'Weaving the Web'. In it, TimBL explains that HTML was meant to be just a way of linking to the real documents, in word processing formats, .ps etc. It was not intended to be the primary authoring medium, but people took it and ran with it, confounding their expectations.

Also recommended: How the Web was born.

It's not that am an expert, but at the moment I am reading this book by Tim Berners Lee. Btw, I bought it a few years ago and started reading it because of the Olympics and the openning ceremony.

Anyway, in the book he wrote that US DoJ started several investigations on Microsoft in mid nineties, their monopoly practices and bundling practices so in 1997 they all struck a deal, DoJ would stop prosecuting them if Microsoft promises among other things that they would never bundle web browser with the OS. Well, next year Microsoft did exactly that in Windows 98.

That would be the main difference. Apple never promised to anyone they won't bundle Safari with the OS.

EDIT:

I took some time on Wikipedia just to check why am I downvoted here, and it looks as if things I wrote above are true: United States v. Microsoft. MS and DoJ had a deal and later Microsoft tried to argue that Internet Explorer wasn't a separate product but a feature of the operating system.