Web 1.0

Usually referred to as the Web as it existed from 1993 to 2000, before the emergence of the more participatory Web 2.0

History

From Mark Bergman.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

Pre 'Structured Web' definitions of the web:

"This initial start to the Web — today now referred to by some as ‘Web 1.0′ — can be squarely timed to 1993-1994. By 1995, the Web was appearing on the covers of major news magazines and by 1996 the phenomenon was at full throttle. But, since these early beginnings, the Web has gone through many different “versions” and transitions, most not fitting with version numbers, as some of these examples show:

• Academic v. Commercial Web — magazines like Wired, Red Herring, Business 2.0 and the mainstream press showered us with names such as e-commerce, dot-com and the gold rush for companies to establish a Web presence, B2B, etc. in the latter part of the 1990s. In fact, for some early architects of the Web, this was a period of some trauma and handwringing, since the “pure” open and academic roots of the Internet and the Web were being taken over by mainstream use, commercialization and the monied dominance of venture capital. This first major change in the Web, its first major new ‘version’ if you will, came back down to earth as a result of the “dot-com bust” of the bubble in 2001 [4]

• Static v. Dynamic Web — all initial Web content was based on documents created by hand and posted as individual and hyperlinked Web pages. The relatively few documents of the early Web meant that hand-compiled “best of” listings such as Yahoo! worked pretty well; ‘metasearchers‘ also emerged to overcome the limited indexing coverage of early search engines. These trends, however, were also masking another version sea-change for the Web. With growth and more content, many larger sites were moving to dynamic page generation with retrieval via search forms. This dynamic portion of the Web, called at times either the ‘deep Web‘ or ‘invisible Web,’ acted like standard search engines and therefore was generally overlooked until I first popularized this change in 2000. I would argue that the shift to dynamic content, with certainly hundreds of thousands of such database-backed sites now in existence — and content many times larger than what is indexed by standard search engines — was also a major version shift for the Web

• Open Source and Open Data –the open source Linux and the Apache Web server have been two software foundations to the growth of the Web, and MySQL has had a leading role in supporting sites and software with database-backed designs [6]. It is beyond the scope of this piece, but I believe that the dot-com frenzy, the demise of Netscape by Internet Explorer and other tensions with commercial interests, plus the very empowering nature of the Internet itself are also leading to a version change of the Web from commercial software products to open source ones. Further, proprietary publishers and data sources have only had limited success on the Web; we are now seeing strong trends to open data as well. Additionally, the very nature of open source software lends itself to interoperability and modularity based on naturally selected building blocks. This “open” infrastructural basis of the Web is more subtle and hard to see, but provides some powerful drivers for how more surface-oriented trends express themselves

• Social Networking Web — the same early software that enabled dynamic Web pages and database-backed designs naturally lent themselves to early blogs, wikis and content-management systems, many backed by MySQL, which in turn led to more community-oriented designs and services such as del.icio.us for bookmarking, Flickr for photos, later YouTube for videos, and literally thousands of others. This trend, resulting from changed practices and the use of different tools and ways to harness user-generated content, and not resulting from any changes to standards per se, was first called ‘Web 2.0′ by Tim O’Reilly in about 2003

• Ajax and [[Widgets[[ — some would include Web services, APIs and ‘mashups‘ in the Web 2.0, often as expressed through embedded Web ‘widgets‘ and the use of Ajax or similar dynamic scripting approaches. These considerations were not part of the original Web 2.0 term, but usage today likely embraces aspects of these in many definitions of Web 2.0. In any case, there is certainly a change within the Web to more interactive, attractive, full-featured user interfaces, with interface updates no longer requiring a full Web page refresh

• Document-centric Web v. Data-centric Web — however, in any event, portions of these trends and changes are more broadly combining to represent another version change in the Web from one solely focused on documents to one that is more data-centric; this topic, the basis for the term ‘structured Web,’ is more fully discussed below

• Web 3.0 — Wikipedia states, “Web 3.0 is a term that has been coined with different meanings to describe the evolution of Web usage and interaction among several separate paths. These include transforming the Web into a database, a move towards making content accessible by multiple non-browser applications, the leveraging of artificial intelligence technologies, the Semantic web, or the Geospatial Web.” Of all current terms, this one is fully the silliest, since there is no consensus on what it represents nor its endpoints

• Semantic Web — the glossary at W3C states that the semantic Web is “the Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.” Elsewhere, the vision of the semantic Web is described by the Education and Outreach working group (SWEO) of the W3C “to extend principles of the Web from documents to data. This extension will allow to fulfill more of the Web’s potential, in that it will allow data to be shared effectively by wider communities, and to be processed automatically by tools as well as manually.” Note the importance of computer processing and autonomy in these statements, not to mention the pivotal term of ’semantics.’ This is an expansive and wide-embracing vision, some challenges of which I more fully describe below, and

• Visions of the Web — the semantic Web vision is matched with other visions, including voice activation, autonomous agents doing our bidding in the background, wireless interlinked everything, and other versions of the Web that are sometimes portrayed in science fiction. Whenever such transitions occur, they will all surely rely on all the various “versions” of the Web that have occurred in the short past 15 years of the Web’s existence."

(http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=390)