The World Wide Web

2.4 Summary

In this chapter, we have briefly recapitulated the history of the current Web and outlined its most substantial developments and success factors. The traditional Web is based on three main building blocks: global identification of resources via URIs, a simple client-server-based protocol for persistent publication of globally accessible data (HTTP), and an easy-to-use language for creating interlinked hypertext documents (HTML).

Standardization is the key for technologies such as the Web in reaching their current level of success and interoperability. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) and other standardization bodies are working towards the continuous progress of Web-related standards, by controlling accessability and compliance with basic Web principles.

As we have seen, a first step towards the next generation of the Web and a more strict separation between content and layout has already been taken with the introduction of XML and the related family of standards, of which we have sketched a few. As we shall see in the following chapters, however, this takes us only halfway towards real machine-processable Web content and interoperable services. We need to bring back the computer as a device for computation and assistance to help us deal better with the rapidly growing amount of information available on the Web.

Note that unlike other documents in the literature, we do not include XML per se in the “Semantic Web”, but instead consider the family of standards around XML as an intermediate step towards a real machine-processable Web infrastructure.