Week 3 – What were your first experiences with the Web?

Sky asked the question…

What were your first experiences with the Web?

I remember getting really excited about ICQ when a friend showed me how it worked, it was fascinating how I was able to message my friends no matter where they were or at what time. It was at times like living in a virtual post office. So right from the start the community aspect of the Web played a massive role.

Another huge part of my early life online back in the mid 90’s was Warez and mp3’s, yes I knew that they were illegal and potentially full of viruses but I took the risk. I joined an iRC channel and we began trading mp3’s and such via the primitive and slow transfer protocols. Looking back on these times I realise that it was not the fact of getting free tunes or software that made these memorable times it was the community that was created around these activities.

With today’s websites being interactive and collaborative this has allowed more people to feel part of a community online, reducing borders and allowing people to find likeminded people to share and create this new world. However, I feel that social networking sites and other forms of online communities have been created by very savvy developers who realised that to create a major share in the market, that communities are what retain active members to a website.

NOTES

• The World Wide Web is an application that runs on the Internet
• The Web is known as the ‘public face’ on the Net
• The Memex in 1945 was the creation of Vannevar Bush
• Doug Engelbart in 1968 created the first mouse
• Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web
• The Web was the first many-to-many communications medium
• URL – Uniform Resource Locators
• HTML – Hypertext Markup Language

Week 3 Board Discussions

Author: Anthony Donahoe
Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 12:36:57 PM WST
Subject: RE: Official ‘What is the World Wide Web?’ thread

Hello Sky,
Is there a place where we can find a list and explanations for technologies that underpin the web, eg hypertext
Thanks
Anthony

my reply:

Hi Anthony

Im not sure if you have seen this at Google but I find that it is really handy to get a quick definition of a term.

you can just search Google using define.

ie

define: hypertext
define: Web 2.0

Hope this helps

Author: Sean Pryor
Date: Monday, September 14, 2009 10:10:23 AM WST
Subject: RE: Official ‘What is the World Wide Web?’ thread

One of the biggest differences I have noticed in pages then and now, is the interaction that pages offer in terms of customization and personalization.

I’m not sure if Yahoo was the first company to do this, but even back in early 1999, they were offering an option to create a personalized experience, something that Google didnt offer until late 2005.

One other big difference is that site content generally had to be managed on static html pages and the user was required to “leave” the home page to view other content on the site. With the use of databases, sql and php content is generated on the page you visit as required.

It would be interesting to explain to someone using the web 15 years ago that the pages they are visiting today don’t actually exist only the content does.

Very cool

my reply:

I remember back in early 1998 I was getting a website developed that contained links, images, appz etc, initially we started the site and it was a static design, whe then decided to change this and use new software called Common Gateway Interface (CGI). For me this was the first experience in creating on the fly webpages. With a mix of CGI, Flat file databases and includes such as

<!–#include file=”linktop.txt” –>

And

<!– begin links Windows –>

<!– end links Windows –>

we were able to build a site where the actual html pages was very small in size, basically only containing styling. Allowing the content of the website to be ‘called’ into the html from the database.

As Sean mentioned about a surfer from 15 years ago imagining that there is only content and not static pages I would like to think that a developer would have imagined such a way of design, however, a surfer would have no concept.

I feel that today’s blogs and wikis etc are just an evolution of this style of design, with better technologies such as mySQL, phpMyAdmin and php developers are able to produce much faster, secure and functional user created websites.

Author: Sky Croeser
Posted date: Thursday, September 17, 2009 6:16:10 PM WST
Last modified date: Thursday, September 17, 2009 6:16:10 PM WST
Total views: 6  Your views: 3

Do you think these improvement in software were in response to customers’ needs or desires, or do you think they came out of just playing around with what could be done and trying to extend it? (Or both? Or neither?)

my reply:

I think the changes came about from developers wanting a more streamlined way of site design and content display.

Author: Sky Croeser
Posted date: Thursday, September 17, 2009 6:13:20 PM WST
Last modified date: Thursday, September 17, 2009 6:13:20 PM WST
Total views: 8  Your views: 4

As Tama mentioned during the lecture, increasing bandwidth may also be a factor in changes to the structure of websites.

my reply:

I would very much agree that an increase in availability and a decrease in the price of bandwidth have lead to a change in the structure of a website. Pre broadband you could see clearly how much webmasters would compress and resize images to get the lowest possible file size, these days surfers would not check to see how big an image was before viewing it. I would say that the bandwidth changes are directly related to the type of content rich sites we see today.