Introducing Python, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. The Web, Untangled

Oh, what a tangled web we weave…

Walter Scott, Marmion

Straddling the French–Swiss border is CERN—a particle physics research institute that smashes atoms multiple times, just to make sure.

All that smashing generates a mountain of data. In 1989, the English scientist Tim Berners-Lee first circulated a proposal within CERN to help disseminate information there and across the research community. He called it the World Wide Web and distilled its design into three simple ideas:

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

A protocol for web clients and servers to interchange requests and responses.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

A presentation format for results.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

A way to uniquely represent a server and a resource on that server.

In its simplest usage, a web client (I think Berners-Lee was the first to use the term browser) connected to a web server with HTTP, requested a URL, and received HTML.

This was all built on the networking base from the internet, which at the time was noncommercial, and known only to a few universities and research organizations.

He wrote the first web browser and server on a NeXT¹ computer. Web awareness really expanded in 1993, when a group of students at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic web browser (for Windows, the Macintosh, and Unix) and the NCSA httpd server. When I downloaded Mosaic that summer and started building sites, I had no idea that the web and the internet would ...