Almost no one knows where, how and why the web was born. And to think that the inventor of the World Wide Web has just won the Nobel Prize for Computer Science
When we talk about CERN (the European organization for nuclear research) most people think of physics experiments, the largest particle accelerator in the world and the discovery of the Higgs Boson. In truth, the invention of CERN that more than any other has changed our lives has little to do with nuclear physics.
Few people know, in fact, that the inventor of the World Wide Web is Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist of British origin who worked at CERN in Geneva between the 80s and 90s of last century. Great fan of computer science from a very young age, the scientist has favored the birth of the World Wide Web thanks to several projects born with the aim of putting in system all the scientific research projects on which he and his colleagues worked. The World Wide Web, in short, was born as a sort of interactive catalog of scientific projects and then evolve in the "digital zibaldone" that we use daily.
World Wide Web, meaning and structure
The translation of World Wide Web (at least in its literal form) is "spider web of world size" and helps, even if partially, to make the idea of what the web is. It is, in fact, a collection of content (both textual and multimedia) called hypertexts and connected to each other through links and accessible using the communication infrastructure of the Internet. A sort of digital spider's web, in fact, that connects texts, images and videos from all over the world. The beating heart of the web, even today, are the links, which allow Internet users to move from one hypertext to another in a fraction of a second.
The inventor of the World Wide Web
The merit, as said, is of Tim Berners-Lee, who at the end of the '80s has designed and implemented both communication protocols (http above all) that allow users to navigate from one web page to another, both the computer language (html the first ever) necessary to create those same pages. Inventions that earned him the AM Turing Award 2017, considered by all as the Nobel Prize for Computer Science.
The Future of the World Wide Web
Born as an evolution of the ENQUIRE software, today's World Wide Web is unrecognizable or almost if compared to its first version. Early protocols and languages have given way to more up-to-date and secure versions. Improvements that have made the web more accessible and more interactive (the so-called web 2.0), but that have brought, according to Tim Berners-Lee himself, problems that are anything but minor.
Berners-Lee, who today directs the World Wide Web Consortium (an independent body that deals with the approval of new web standards), hopes for a more open platform and more attentive to the privacy of users. A platform, above all, that fights and curbs the phenomenon of fake news. In short, in the head of its inventor, the World Wide Web of the future will be a place where everyone can decide where and how to store their information and in which false information and fake news will not be at home.