The World Wide What?

It was brought to my attention recently by a reader of this column that not once in the 18 months I've been doing this have I written about the World Wide Web--never. Perhaps it's because I spend so much time there that I don't consider it special. After all, you don't see folks writing about the new and exciting world of paved roads or mail delivery, do you? That stuff's old hat.

But seriously, I may think I know the Web, but many of you don't, and even what I know is constantly becoming outdated with rapid changes in Internet infrastructure, hardware and the social mindset of its users.

So this column is devoted to the wonderful World Wide Web. Where did it come from? Where did it go? Where did it come from, cotton-eyed Joe?

The first thing to get straight is that the World Wide Web is not the Internet.

The next time you have trouble connecting to www.tossedsalad.com, don't whine about your "Internet" being broken. Besides the fact that you don't own the Internet, there are other problems with equating it to the Web.

Consider the Internet as the big kahuna, the once and future network to subsume all networks. It's meta. As an infrastructure, it enables the creation and growth of various information technologies using its network language known as TCP/IP.

The Web is one of many of these out-growths of the Internet. Others include electronic mail and file transfers. The Web exists on the Internet using a language called hypertext transport protocol (http).

In its early days, the Web was used almost exclusively for the sharing of long, boring academic documents that I will never understand. The ability to link one text document to the next using the hypertext markup language (HTML) allowed scholastic communities to keep in touch.

Now the Web is becoming a more exciting, diverse and cluttered space. It is still used for academic reasons--all Harvard students will have extensive use of course Web sites by the time they graduate. However, new uses for the Web are developing.

These break down into three categories: multimedia, commerce and function.

First, multimedia. As I write this column, I'm listening to a streaming audio version of a Raekwon album I found at www.broadcast.com. With products such as RealPlayer, people can listen to radio stations and watch television programming across the world with steadily improving quality. Yes, you too can listen to KOKL in bustling Okmulgee, Oklahoma!

Anyone who has seen a movie in the past two years is familiar with the idea of movie Web sites that provide trailers, background information and even video games related to the plot.

Second, commerce. Business has always driven computer technology forward, and this continues to be true with the Web. The Web has enabled customers and companies to be connected across distances in an immediate fashion that catalog stores could never do. The primary business that can be done on the Web by the average Joe Sixpack is to visit an on-line store, discount products site or auction.

Discount sites are centralized filters to multiple sources of goods. They generally have contracts with re-seller clients to put products on their site. Some examples include www.pricewatch.com and www.pricescan.com. I purchased my 3Com PalmPilot Professional at a 30 percent discount via Pricescan.

Auction sites are becoming increasingly popular as well. Ebay (www.ebay.com) went public in late September, and its stock value has increased 70 percent since the initial public offering. These sites primarily serve as facilitators of exchange between buyers and sellers, and they have no products themselves. Other auction sites include www.onsale.com and www.webauction.com.

But the most significant development in the Web arena is in the definition of the Web itself: how content is delivered and what that content is. In the standard HTML model you have a two-or-three-part system.

On the backend, there's a database of content such as retail products or newspaper articles. In the middle, there's the that operates on the backend--performing searches, for example, and delivering data to the front end-the browser.

Recent introductions to the Web, such as style sheets and scripting languages offer more than static information. Dynamic HTML (DHTML) is a standard-in-progress in which Web pages themselves can have applications written in them. This means that burdens on Web servers can be lessened and content can be even more lively.

So keep your head up on this Web business, both to take advantage of its offerings and to understand its limitations.

Baratunde R. Thurston '99 is The Crimson's online-technology chair and a member of HASCS's advanced support team. Please send comments, suggestions smut and question to techtalk@thecrimson.harvard.edu