REST API Design Rulebook

Chapter 1. Introduction

Hello World Wide Web

The Web started in the “data acquisition and control” group at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Geneva, Switzerland. It began with a computer programmer who had a clever idea for a new software project.

In December of 1990, to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, Tim Berners-Lee started a non-profit software project that he called “WorldWideWeb.”^[6] After working diligently on his project for about a year, Berners-Lee had invented and implemented:

• The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), a syntax that assigns each web document a unique address

• The HyperText Transfer Protocol^[7] (HTTP), a message-based language that computers could use to communicate over the Internet.

• The HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML), to represent informative documents that contain links to related documents.

• The first web server.^[8]

• The first web browser, which Berners-Lee also named “WorldWideWeb” and later renamed “Nexus” to avoid confusion with the Web itself.

• The first WYSIWYG^[9] HTML editor, which was built right into the browser.

On August 6, 1991, on the Web’s first page, Berners-Lee wrote,

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.^[10]

From that moment, the Web began to grow, at times exponentially. Within five years, the number of web users skyrocketed to 40 million. At one point, the number was doubling every two months. The “universe of ...