| Writing for the Web: A Primer for Librarians |
The power of the web lies in the authors ability to associate sections of text or images within a Web document to other networked resources using "hypertext." This interlinking of associated resources creates an electronic web of interconnecting computers around the world, hence the "World Wide" Web. Connectivity is achieved through the use of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The concept of hypertext has been around since Vannevar Bush came up with the concept for Memex as described in the article As We May Think which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. It wasn't until 45 years later that HTML was conceived in the paper WorldWide Web: Proposal for a HyperText Project, written by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau of CERN. This paper detailed a project to access data already available at CERN; reports, experiment data, personnel data, electronic mail address lists, and documentation. The first software used to "browse" hypertext data was also developed at CERN. The web arrived at the desktop of librarians with the release of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' ( NCSA) Mosaic. Since Mosaic's release in 1993 a multitude of other browsers have been developed, most notably Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Additional groundwork for HTML and the web was laid by Douglas
Engelbart, who founded the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford
Research Institute (SRI) in 1963. He is widely credited with helping to
develop the computer mouse, hypertext, groupware and many other seminal
technologies. Ted
Nelson coined the term hypertext and has spent his life promoting
a global hypertext system called Project
Xanadu. His book Computer
Lib / Dream Machines describes hypermedia including branching movies,
such as the film Kino-automat: One Man and his Jury at the
Czechoslovakian Pavilion at Expo `67. Additional ResourcesBardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Multimedia : from Wagner to Virtual Reality / edited by Randall Packer and Ken Jordan. New York : Norton, 2001
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