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The WWW and its future as a hyper-application system

Submitted by Jakob on 18 May, 2006 - 14:23.My Blog | Human-Computer Interaction | Internet | Usability

When the idea of the World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee it was the idea of the hypertext web. A network of documents with contextual links forming a mesh of information which supported retrieval and authoring of documents. Today with the popularity of blogs, wikis and the advent of AJAX and realtime interfaces we're seeing the way people use the WWW taking a new direction, a hybrid system that merges the document browser with the application viewer, a hybrid I'd like to call the "hyper-application system".

The World Wide Web was originally modeled on the idea of the hypertext library, a database holding millions of documents all contextually linked. This hypertext library would support a huge amount of text and offer version control and would be "aware" of any changes made to prevent "dead" links from occuring. No document could be deleted, since there was no need to delete anything. People using the system could edit existing documents or author new ones.

The World Wide Web of Hypertext

Hypertext was not a novel concept back in 1990, in fact it had been around since 1965 and there had been attempts at building hypertext systems. Perhaps the most famous hypertext system was Xanadu. The Xanadu website contains a lot of information about hypertext and the Xanadu idea of the deep hypertext system. So the WWW, as the CERN people imagined it, was blessed with some of the properties of hypertext. The software used to navigate this hypertext library was called a browser. As the name suggests it was meant to be used to browse and view pages.

The hypertext library, the Internet "page" metaphor has existed ever since. Even though a website is a rather alien concept considering the library metaphor, we have somehow grown accustomed to the way of looking at the Internet as having sites that have pages, a lot like books have pages. This metaphor was rather sufficient back in 1995 when I started using the WWW and the Internet when most sites and pages were static. Slowly however interaction became possible, the first examples of such applications on the web being the HTML/HTTP-based chatrooms where you could talk to other people using a regular browser. I recall my friend and I using the Mosaic 0.9 something browser back in September of 1995 hanging out in the chatroom at the website of Sweden's largest tabloid.

Introducing interaction

As these interactive applications became more and more common the page metaphor became less and less fitting, at least for the majority of websites. Some sites introduced features that right out broke with the metaphor, ticket booking sites and search engines to mention two examples. Both generating dynamic pages that were based on data the user had fed back to the site using a web page form. When Netscape introduced client-side scripting, so called JavaScript, the number things you could do with a browser increased manifold. Though JavaScript was at first mostly used for amusement rather than useful things it has become one of the most important technologies on the WWW today.

Introducing the hypertext pre-processor and its best friend

Eventually even server-side scripting became easier and more accessible as PHP gained popularity in the early 00's. Coupled with its best friend the MySQL database application, it offered an extremely easy way to set up and run a highly dynamic website. A sort of synergetic effect was achieved and soon Linux, the free open source operating system, along with the Apache web server application, were what powered most of the web servers of the world. Unlike CGI and other scripting technologies that required access to a server, and a thorough understanding of how *nix operating systems work as well as skills in programming languages such as C or Perl, PHP was accessible and easy to learn and offered many ready-made functions right out of the box. Today, most websites are powered by what is often referred to as LAMP: Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP, all four of them being free open source software. The Internet was redefined by open source, and open source by it and made way for how the WWW would come to be used.

With the momentum of open source, the number of dynamic websites exploded. Soon there were thousands of applications available written in PHP and setting up your own forum, or community-based website became a snap. The WWW was becoming interactive, and people were more often contributing and exchanging information with people rather than just obtaining it by browsing static pages. During this period the wiki gained recognition, having existed since 1995 it wasn't until the early 00's that it became truly successful realizing one of the Tim Berner-Lee's original ideas, that users of the WWW should be able to author new content using their browsers.

During the years that followed we saw a lot of new types of services appear, perhaps the weblog, or blog as it's known today, being the one thing during this time that had most impact on how people used the Internet. The blog allows anyone to write their own column or run their own diary or publication however the idea was far from new. Indeed it was already possible to build this kind of application before using PHP and MySQL or other web technologies but what truly revolutionized blogging were the "blog farms" such as Blogger or BlogSpot, which made it easy as pie to create your own blog and start writing, start contributing to the World Wide Web of information. User and reader contribution was made possible through blogs allowing comments, something that has had almost as much impact on the WWW as the idea of the blog itself.

World Wide Web - a hyper-application system

So in 2005 a new hyped acronym came into existence, AJAX. Having formerly only been known as a brand of cleaner, AJAX was the fusion of several already existing technologies and offered a way to send data back and forth between browser and web server in realtime without having to force the page to reload. Many websites use AJAX today, from the now famous GMail to personal RSS feed aggregators such as Pageflakes. I love AJAX but as much as I love it I also know that it is what will finally sever the last ties the Internet had to the original page metaphor. Websites are now becoming applications much like the ones you already have on your computer. With the browser as a way to use and run these applications, it becomes an application viewer, or "application facilitator".

What we're seeing today is the WWW becoming what its original visionaries imagined, a hypertext system but not just a hypertext system with static pages and links. It's an application hypertext system, a hyper application system so to say where pages are more like applications in themselves that send and retrieve information from other pages and websites through a number of different technologies. All these applications and services being accessible through the use of a modern browser, or application viewer.

I'm thrilled to see how the Internet has developed in another ten years. So far the WWW, of all the Internet technologies, has probably had most impact on our lives and on how we share information, communicate and do business with each other and I believe it will stay that way but probably not exactly the way it is today. The WWW is organic, and it keeps growing and surprising us and I'm happy to be here for the ride!



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