The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext

Several strange things happened on the World Wide Web. From abstraction, confusion, and information networks, we are slowly moving to what I call social hypertext. Initially, I did not pay much attention to the network. After all, this is a new view of a distributed information server system such as WAIS [8] and Gopher [1]. Indeed, the functionality of a Web browser that is easier to use than WAIS and can display text and graphics formatted with embedded links is more appealing and attractive than WAIS and Gopher.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is an open source information space where documents and other network resources are identified by URLs, linked together via hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. The World Wide Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. When I worked at CERN in Switzerland in 1990, he wrote his first web browser. Web pages are text documents formatted and annotated primarily using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to formatting the text, the web page may also include images, video, and software components that are presented as a coherent page of multimedia content in the user's web browser. Embedded hyperlinks allow users to navigate between web pages. Multiple Web pages with common themes, common domain names, or both can be called Web sites. The content of the website can be interacted mainly when it is provided by the publisher or the user provides content that is dependent on the user or its behavior.

Since the design of the World Wide Web itself is not dynamic, the initial hypertext consisted of handwritten HTML published on the web server. Any modifications to the published page must be performed by the author of the page. In 1993, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard was introduced to connect external applications to a web server and to provide dynamic web pages that reflect user input. However, since the original implementation of the CGI interface starts a separate process for each request, it usually adversely affects the load on the server. Recent implementations utilize the persistence process of other technologies to reduce the footprint of server resources and achieve general performance improvements.

Watching web pages or other resources on the World Wide Web is typically done by typing the URL of the page in a web browser or by following a hypertext link to that page or resource. The first step behind the scenes is to resolve the server name part of the URL to an IP address via a globally distributed Internet database called Domain Name System (DNS). The next step is to send an HTTP request to the web server with that IP address to get the required page. For a typical Web page, HTML text, graphics, and other files that make up part of the page are requested and returned to the client (Web browser) quickly and continuously.