Not-So-Infinite Loop
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 8
Column Tag: WebObjects
The Not-So-Infinite Loop: Request-Response in
By Sam Krishna and Patrick Taylor
In the beginning there was the Web...
When Tim Berners-Lee wrote Web.app (the first graphical web browser) using
Nextstep tools, he couldn't have imagined the way the World Wide Web (1) would
captivate an unsuspecting public. As revolutionary as it has become, Berners-Lee's
creation wasn't a unique event. There were many predecessors to the Web which
ranged from Vannevar Bush's ambitious, but ahead-of-the-technology, Memex to Ted
Nelson's ambitious, but directionless, Xanadu. Unlike most of its predecessors though,
the technology behind the Web was - and is - remarkably simple, especially when you
consider how it is being applied today.
Most everyone knows at least a bit about how the Web works. With a browser that
supports HTTP (hypertext transport protocol), a user connects to a remote server
using an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) stored as either a bookmark or from a
hypertext link on a document located at another remote location. The browser then
proceeds to interpret the HTML tags in a text file on the remote server, formatting the
text file based on the tagging. Hypertext links within index pages serve as
springboards to other documents both within the current server or any number of
servers around the world.
The number of those servers increased beyond anyone's reasonable expectations. By
1993, there were 50 web servers. Two years later there were 200 times as many. By
1998 there were well over 6 million and tens of thousands are added every day.
This was not the way the world was supposed to turn out. Back in the early 1990s,
pundits were predicting that in the future information was going to be available to
everyone on CD-ROMs with exciting multimedia interfaces: dictionaries,
encyclopedias, games, cookbooks, repair manuals, baseball statistics; the knowledge of
the world was going to be at your fingertips. As the speed of CD-ROMs leapt from 150
KBps to 300KBps and beyond, all manner of exotic data would be available ... for a
reasonable price. It actually seems a bit funny looking back, but Bill Gates wasn't the
only who didn't "get" the Internet until late 1995. Only the most visionary or lunatic
individuals would have bet that the Web was the future much before then, though
nowadays the whole world claims to have seen it coming as far back as 1991.
Of course, we know how things turned out. Tim Berners-Lee created the tool that
provided the foundation for e-commerce, the rise of open source development as a
mass movement and 11,000 point Dow Jones stock-markets. Would that all Nextstep
apps have been so successful!
Good Enough, But Not By Itself
Berners-Lee wasn't out to revolutionize the world, but rather to create a useful tool
that would let researchers at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) share
documents and data. Of course, it didn't take a nuclear physicist to see the advantages to
hypertext linking and the simplicity of the Web's design over handling paper