The fist steps of the Internet were developed in order to enable distant scientists to share their documents. It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire or European Organization for Nuclear Research) began the Web project with two-folded goals: (1) to develop ways of linking distant documents (hyperlink); and (2) to invent ways of enabling users to work together (collaborative authoring) [KALAKOTA 1997]

To encourage collaboration among programmers and software developers, CERN made all the software source code publicly available. This model is perhaps the key reason for behind the Web’s success. A tremendous following among programmers contributed their efforts to debugging the software and extending its functionality, which resulted in increasing the productivity of CERN projects and its quality of work. The first prominent progress of the project was in 1993 when Mosaic, the first browser with graphical user interface, was developed [KALAKOTA 1997]

In October 1994 Tim Berner-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory of Computer Science (MIT/LCS) [W3C]. The Web project was moved from CERN to this place to continue its development without proprietary influences. This consortium leads the Web to its full potential by developing common standards that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.  

In December 1994 Netscape Communications, the company formed by the engineering teams who built the original Mosaic, developed the first commercially available browser for the Web, Netscape Navigator [KALAKOTA 1997].  This browser provided built-in security capabilities to facilitate commercial transactions over the Internet. Since then the Web has increased astoundingly. According to the New Scientist in 1994[KALAKOTA 1997] the web was growing at roughly one percent a day, a doubling period of less than ten weeks.

The Web is a large-scale distributed hypermedia system that is based on cooperating servers attached to a network, usually the Internet, and allows access to “documents” containing “links” [DIC 86]. To put it more simply the web is a collection of distributed documents referred as “pages” located on computers (or servers) all over the world [KALAKOTA 1997].

Documents are presented mainly in the hypertext mark-up language (HTML). This may consist of textual material or a number of other forms, such as graphics, audio clips, or video images. Web servers, also called Web sites, store HTML files and respond to request from browsers. A Web browser, such as Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, or Internet Explorer, is a special piece of software that enables users to find and view documents on web servers. It acts as a graphical interface between the user and the Web. This means it sends a request for data from other computers and formats this data for the users screen. Taglines in HTML documents inform the browser how to do this.

The primary strengths of the Web include support for hypertext, hypermedia and the client/server model.

Hypertext is a way of organizing related information by linking separate documents. It usually takes the form of normal text mixed with hyperlinks, i.e highlighted key words or phrases which when clicked load the connected document. The Web also extends the hypertext metaphor to Hypermedia that includes multimedia, i.e. graphics, audio, video as well as contextual materials.

The Web architecture is based on the client/server model. It is considerable more flexible than the traditional mainframe or host-based model. In the host-based model users using a dumb terminal can only access a mainframe whereas, the mainframe it shelf does all the data processing [KALAKOTA 1997]. Furthermore the web architecture allows PC users to connect to a network and provide access to distributed computing resource The potential benefit of these services for the publishing sector is accessibility, more user-friendly environments and most of all straightforward procedures that are saving time. Using this approach the opportunities offered by the new technology infrastructure are utilized in the best possible manner.             top^