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CHAPTER 51

Putting Information
on the Web

IN THIS CHAPTER

  • The Rocket That Launched the Internet 1122
  • The Birth of the Web
  • Why Put Information on the Web Benefits and Pitfalls 1125
  • HTML 1127
  • The Medium Is the Message 1137
  • The Role of the Browser 1138
  • HTML and Oracle's Web Server 1139
  • Oracle's ConText Product 1141
  • VRML 1142

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The Rocket That Launched the Internet

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the United States rushed to close the technology gap that was feared to exist between the two nations. One interesting organization to come out of this funding was ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). One area they explored was a way to hook up large mainframe computers so different groups of people could exchange information. ARPA later produced a study on "the cooperative network of time-sharing computers." This, along with an earlier paper at the RAND corporation by Paul Baran titled "On Distributed Communications Networks," inspired the first attempts at an internet.

In 1965 a computer at M.I.T. was directly linked to a computer in Santa Monica; the world of the Internet was being born. Soon, the agency that had been launched when Sputnik took off, ARPA, prototyped ARPAnet, which linked together UCLA, Stanford, UCSB, and the University of Utah. In 1973 London joined as the first international member to ARPAnet. By 1976, the queen of England was even said to have sent e-mail.

Soon different internets began to spring up, but there was basic agreement upon the protocol of the Internet todayTCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol). Today we refer to this common layer as TCP/IP. TCP/IP was designed for reliable communications between different points in a network. Actually, ARPAnet had been initially designed as a way for a computer network to survive a nuclear attack with "heavy node losses," so TCP/IP would keep a network viable even if certain nodes crashed.

Probably, because the initial years of the Internet were dominated more by universities and government agencies than by corporations, standards were more easily agreed upon. Because these networks were being used by a small set of professionals for specific tasks , however, innovation moved slower. Throughout the 1980s, the Internet was dominated by very Spartan-like tools that are a far cry from today's graphical interfaces and fancy GUI tools that ISPs (Internet service providers) and browser companies have for us today.

The Birth of the Web

In 1991, at the physics research institute CERN in Switzerland, a researcher named Tim Berners-Lee came up with the protocol and elements that defined the World Wide Web. He was looking for an automated way to link information around the world so researchers could collaborate and work on projects together. Researchers needed a way to quickly move between documents, regardless of what computer the document resided on. To do this, he created the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The idea of hypertext itself was to allow text documents to contain terms or pictures that would link to other text elements. For example, if you were writing about the erosion of coral reefs in Hawaii, you might want to point the user to another document defining coral reefs and another document giving more information on Hawaii. In this way, people could find concepts they needed more information on as they were researching a topic. With HTTP, the network

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location of each document was hidden from the user. So, if someone read your research on erosion of coral reefs, they could refer to other research that might also be needed but existed on different machines. (See Figure 51.1.)

Figure 51.1.
HTTP hides the
physical location of a
document from a user.

The language that was created to let you design documents (later came to be called Web pages) was named hypertext markup language (HTML). By using the standards of this language, documents could be created anywhere in the world and linked together. More importantly, with a universal document language, Web browsers would be able to read a standard format of text throughout the Internet, which allowed for more complex document objects such as graphics and the powerful idea of linking documents together.

The World Wide Web itself was based on the method of identifying different machines on the Internet known as URL, which stands for uniform resource locator. A filename is similar to a URL in that it gives a pathway such as c:\ letters \myletter.txt that defines a logical location

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on a disk. A URL is a name that points to a location on the Internet, which could be thought of as a massive disk where each location is a different computer. For instance, the Web address http://www.mycomputer.com points to a certain physical location on the Internet. (See Figure 51.2.)

Figure 51.2.
URLs translate complex
physical network
addressing to simple
addresses.

This, of course, is not to say that one physical machine cannot contain many URLs, which are considered virtual domains, to the Internet.

As the average person began to access the early Web pages that government organizations and universities published, the popularity of the medium spread. A child on a school computer in Alabama could now access NASA's Web page and download pictures of Saturn. The Mosaic Web browser was the first browser that could take advantage of the World Wide Web. It was designed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Soon everyone demanded that their ISPs provide them with Web browsers so they could surf the big waves of the Internet.

As the popularity of Web pages grew and rock bands began using them to promote their music, every company in the United States realized this was a new way of advertising. Soon every business needed a Web page, and small Web companies sprang up. Netscape came on to the picture, along with Microsoft, and created more browsers. Today, companies are wrestling for control of the browser wars. Services such as America Online (AOL) are being flooded by millions of new users who just want to surf the waves, now that one can order books, pizza, and even find jobs to pay for everything, right from the convenience of home.

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Oracle Unleashed
Oracle Development Unleashed (3rd Edition)
ISBN: 0672315750
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 1997
Pages: 391

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