Talk:World Wide Web

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the World Wide Web article.
Former featured article This article is a former featured article. Please see its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.
Wikipedia CD Selection World Wide Web is either included in the 2006 Wikipedia CD Selection or is a candidate for inclusion in the next version (the project page is at WPCD Selection). Please maintain high quality standards, and if possible stick to GFDL and GFDL-compatible images.
Main Page trophy World Wide Web appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on November 1, 2004.
News This article has been cited as a source by a media organization. See the 2005 press source article for details.

The citation is in: "Click Back, in Click Online" (July 4th 2005). BBC World. [1].

Discussions from 2001 to September 2005 have been archived.

Contents

[edit] Improving this article

The current article strikes me as convoluted, as it evolved over a few years from a reasonable summary into a poorly-structured hodge-podge. It's time to be bold and work together in order to give the Web an article worthy of its impact on the Wide World ;-). The text should explain elementary notions in simple terms, and be more informative and complete for advanced readers. Some salient shortcomings were noted by Fredrik back in 2004 when the article was featured; sadly, most of his comments are still relevant today, so I'll copy them here to start the discussion. -- JFG 02:11, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

This article, featured on the main page today, has several problems. Parts of this article read way too much like an essay, with clear instances of POV and/or original, subjective interpretation ("these bold visions", "beyond text", also see "Publishing web pages" comment on talk). The overall structure is poor; the order and choice of sections seems arbitrary. For example, the "Java and Javascript" section should rather be called "Dynamic content", or something similar, and cover more than these two particular technologies. The section says nothing useful about what dynamic content is and what it is supposed to be good for. The "Sociological implications" section is vague and incomplete at best. Poor writing: many one-sentence paragraphs, missing wikilinks. Sub-standard choice of images. And perhaps the worst problem: this article is blatantly incomprehensive; there is almost nothing on types of websites, search engines, organization of the web and websites, the web's role in commerce, and probably many things I didn't think about. In my opinion, this article could use a rewrite from the ground up. Fredrik | talk 18:35, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Call for help with a major rewrite proposal. This article needs some love: come and submit your ideas! -- JFG 04:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation

Is that fat section on the pronunciation of 'www' in various languages (and dialects!) really necessary? It seems like there's gotta be something more important that could replace it.

I think it's relevant. It provides one interesting angle on how various peoples around the world have approached the problem of concisely referring to a network service that purports to call itself "World Wide." --Coolcaesar 22:48, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, it's potentially useful, and definitely interesting. I don't see the slightest harm in it being there. --Oolong 10:52, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

The quotation:

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.
— Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

This Mr. Adams apparently missed Archie Bunker refering to his service in "Double-you double-you eye-eye." 140.147.160.78 19:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)Stephen Kosciesza

Well, the "Pronunciation" section provides no citations, so it should be considered POV until sources are put in there. I've never heard anyone say, "triple 'double u'," "triple dub", or "all the double u's." But I'm just asking for a source to be cited. 68.38.242.66 20:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] graphic

the graphic violates wikipedias policies about not being self-referential. this article is about the www, there is no reason why we should display it as revolving around wikipedia. 69.22.42.35 20:59, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] HTTP cookie

I have submitted the article HTTP cookie for peer review (I am posting this notice here as this article is related). Comments are welcome here: Wikipedia:Peer review/HTTP cookie. Thanks. - Liberatore(T) 16:57, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Jean Armo(u?)r Polly

Coolcaesar claims that the name of the librarian who coined the term "surfing the Web" is Jean Armour Polly. There's a "netiquette" site that someone tried to refer to by an one-word article Net-mom called Net-Mom], where the owner signs herself Jean Armour Polly (see bottom of front page). Her biography on the site claims that she's the inventor of the phrase "surfing the Internet". So I'd say that his point is documented. I'll write her a page. --Alvestrand 06:51, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Origins

I think it should be a little clearer that internet hypertext appeared in Gopher before the invention of WWW. I believe WAIS also predates WWW. The "brilliant breakthrough" paragraph makes an incorrect statement in this regard. It should also be mentioned that HTML is based on SGML, with a link to that mark-up language.

Gopher wasn't hypertext. It had directories (lists of terms) and files (text). No links within the texts. WAIS was a search tool; again, not hypertext. Alvestrand 22:31, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The Origins section does nothing to make it clear why the Web is even called a Web, or what was web-like about it. For early users of the Web, before search engines existed, it was clear that the structure was web-like. Unidirectional links allowed users to branch out in a completely unstructured way. Subsequent material may or may not have linked back to the source of the link, and may not have been directly related. For most users of the modern Web, its usage is more structured and hierarchical. Often, a search engine is the starting point, and hyperlinks generally point to areas deeper within and more specific to a given site. This differs from the earlier model when a typical website contained numerous links to discussions of related subjects or keywords on unrelated sites.

Hypertext certainly predates HTTP, as do other protocols. The general issue of what protocols were in common use, such as Gopher, or Archie, or any others that may have allowed searching, are not truly related to the Web, although they are part of Internet history. Since the Web was not a search based medium, but a hypertext based one, HTTP did not truly replace protocols such as Gopher. It was really search engines, which are tools accessible by HTTP, that replaced Gopher. Hypertext itself, in its earlier uses, had nothing to do with the Internet per se. Its first mainstream use was on Apple computers, although the concept was much older. Likewise, the first mainstream use of hypertext on the Internet is the Web itself. Although Berners Lee had an earlier hypertext tool on the Internet, it was not widely recognized. 23 May 2006

I believe the Origins section was actually better a couple of years ago, though I'm not 100% sure. The problem is that this article is vandalized on an hourly basis, and it's often edited by inexperienced, immature, or uneducated users, so the article as a whole is in very bad shape. --Coolcaesar 19:49, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] “World-Wide Web” with a hyphen?

Should “World-Wide Web” rather be written with a hyphen? -- Wegner8 17:09, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Might have been a reasonable suggestion in 1992, but now it's too late - it's been firmly established that it's non-hyphenated. --Alvestrand 17:19, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Minitel, Telidon, Nabu Network

I have been somewhat bold and added a subsection to origins to briefly discuss earlier similar information delivery technologies such as the ones mentioned in the section head just above. I think what I added could be substantially improved and encourage all and sundry to do so

  • My terminology (system/information delivery/...) may be off - I am not an expert in the field
  • Maybe this is not the right article for it, perhaps History of the Internet instead.

-- Martinp 22:25, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Please don't do that. No intelligent person confuses videotex with the Web today. Of course, in 2001, British Telecom had the bright idea of trying to claim that one of its old videotex patents encompassed hypertext and sued Prodigy (now part of SBC, which is now AT&T). The case never got to trial, since the defense got it kicked out on summary judgment because videotex and the Web are so different. The biggest difference (which is what the BT case ultimately turned on) is the fact that the Web and the Internet are both decentralized while videotex was always heavily centralized.--Coolcaesar 06:36, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Actually, I'm going to be bold and delete the section. There is no reason to have a discussion of videotex in the World Wide Web article, which is way too long as is. There are already numerous articles on videotex and the various videotex systems on Wikipedia.--Coolcaesar 06:37, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
Not trying to have a discussion of videotex, or thinking that they get confused. I just think that it's good to mention and point to other technologies which tried to do something similar (which is e.g. Nabu network not just videotex) even though they failed. Just as it is interesting to mention various forks of prehistoric humans (e.g. Neanderthals) in a history of human evolution, even though we are not directly descended from them and would not confuse them. But I won't force the issue -- it was a bold suggestion from someone who was searching where to hang Nabu Network, which has some if marginal interest -- though I'd appreciate alternative suggestions on where else in the whole tree of evolution of the internet/www/networked information/interactive information exchange it ought be mentioned in. Martinp 19:02, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inaccurate definition

The article kicks off with the following text. If its intended to be a definition, its wrong; if its introductory, its misleading:

WWW is The complete set of documents residing on all Internet servers that use the HTTP protocol, accessible to users via a simple point-and-click system.

The errors are:

  • information,not documents
  • not restricted to http
  • need not be acessible to users
  • need not (and often does not) use point and click

--Nantonos 20:48, 18 April 2006 (UTC)


This definition was plagarized from the American Heritage Dictionary (http://www.bartleby.com/61/78/W0227850.html).

[edit] More errors

[edit] text based

Prior to the release of Mosaic, the Web was text based

No. The first Web browser, on the NeXT, had both text and graphics (although not mixed together). The second one, because not everyone had a high-end workstation, ran on basic text erminals. Other browsers, such as Viola, followed. What Mosaic did was to allow graphics to be displayed inline in the text. Unfortunately, Marc based the Mosaic code on the widely available dumb terminal browsers rather than the more fully featured ones. --Nantonos 20:57, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why this article is a mess

I haven't been following this article closely and I didn't realize it has become such a MESS. I just reviewed the article history carefully. Major screw-ups include Ryguillian's 2004 replacement of what was the technically correct definition with the W3C's politically correct one (see [2]), and severe vandalism in October 2005 by user 202.124.147.147 (see [3]) and others shortly thereafter. I suggest a revert back to the last good version at 9 October 2005.[4] Does everyone else concur on this? --Coolcaesar 23:22, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

It's hard from your links to see what you're referring to - only the middle one shows a diff. I haven't been following this article much either but I would be wary of a wholesale revert of over 7 months' work - there must have been some worthwhile additions in that time too, I would have thought. --Nigelj 09:31, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I also disagree with reverting to such an old version, although it was more coherent. Thanks for finding some gems in earlier versions; you should bring the deleted paragraphs back to life. Nantonos also makes some good points in the discussion above. I'm glad to see that some people care, so let's go ahead and clear the mess together! -- JFG 23:03, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrite proposal

Recent comments have encouraged me to create a major rewrite proposal. This article needs some love: come and submit your ideas! -- JFG 04:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Opening paras

Re-reading the opening paragraphs today I notice that the emphasis has been changed, with a lot more on hardware and less on the actual web of information that the article is about. I tracked this down to two edits, 16th Jan by JFG and 4th Apr by Bgs264. In the first, JFG removed a reference to URI, which is the most fundamental underlying concept - more so even than HTTP and HTML. In the second, Bgs264 makes no comment but began what is surely a hopeless list of links to all the different hardware devices that may interact with the web.

I have tried to redress the balance again, while discussions continue regarding a major re-write. --Nigelj 16:40, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I do not agree with all your word choices but agree that it is mostly an improvement. Considering their damage to the article, Bgs264 and JFG may both be possible vandals. --Coolcaesar 21:40, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Dear Coolcaesar, please keep cool! Read my contributions closely and I hope you will be convinced that, far from being a vandal, I am deeply motivated to improve this article and make it both more exact and much clearer, serving the needs of the newcomers as well as the experts. I'd love to read your comments and ideas on my proposal for a major rewrite of this article. We should be able to do a good job by working together.
Concerning the specific change that you criticized, I wanted to make the opening paragraph understandable by non-specialists, which is a fundamental goal of writing an encyclopedia. Defining the Web in terms of URIs was not the most intuitive way to explain it: the Web is first and foremost an information space, URIs and other technicalities are a means to an end, and are duly explained in the following paragraphs. Subsequent changes by Bgs264 and others obfuscated the matter, and Nigelj clarified it again (thanks!). As of today, the opening paragraph has definitely been improved, although I'm sure we will be able to make it even better over time.
Let's keep talking and strive to bring this fundamental article back to "featured" quality. -- JFG 21:26, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
Please try to tone down the agression, Coolcaesar. I'm referring to your edit comment, "Some idiot vandalized my photo..." (06:59, 18 June 2006 on this article). Maybe it's time for you to re-read some of the the basic WP policies and guidelines, and stop abusing your fellow contributors? --Nigelj 12:00, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
Fine, I'll concede that my comment was a bit strong and I apologize. But whomever that Van Dore dude was who edited it, he should have (1) asked me first and (2) done a decent job rather than making a smeared blurry mess or just not touched it at all. Plus making substantive serious modifications to photos (other than basic sharpness and color balancing applied to the whole image) seriously reduces the reliability of the whole encyclopedia.--Coolcaesar 18:31, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Piotr Blass

This guy in his vanity article claims to have co-invented WWW. Please somebody disuade him. Mhym 20:34, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 666

I don't believe there is a letter "w" in Hebrew. Where does this idea that www = 666 come from? I suggest deleting that section, as humorous as it may seem.

[edit] The picture issue

I am having a dispute with User:Netoholic regarding the version of my photo Image:FirstWebServer.jpg that should be displayed in this article and History of the World Wide Web. Several months ago, someone calling himself/herself Van Dore created an altered version, Image:First Web Server.jpg. They attempted to remove the glare of the flash (this was before I learned how to take good photos in low light without a flash) by retouching the photo, but the retouching quality was quite poor.

I would prefer the original unaltered version of my photo to be the version in the article, for several reasons. First, this is a photograph of a historical artifact we are talking about. Directly retouching historical photos (that is, to add or subtract objects in the image) is widely considered to be sleazy and unethical among professional historians (see Wikipedia's own article on Photo manipulation for the history lesson on Joseph Stalin's use of the practice). I never make such edits to my photos; the only adjustments I make to my photos are uniformly applied filters like color balancing, contrast, and sharpness. Sometimes I might crop an image to better frame a subject (for example, to make an off-center subject appear to be in the center) but I never paint over something in the image so that it is no longer there.

Second, this particular retouching was poorly done. It is quite obvious to anyone with a high-quality LCD screen and perfect color version (that would include moi) that the altered version does not look natural because it has an area of pixels in the middle of the exact same color. Such spots are common in artwork, of course, but they are rare in photographs of ordinary objects in their natural environment since the reflection of light from different points on a surface at different distances from the camera results in continuous gradients. The result is that it is immediately apparent that the photo has been altered by an amateur. Wikipedia does not need to be serving up amateur artwork on such an important topic.

I request the community's feedback on this important issue. We may need to amend the image use policy at some point. --Coolcaesar 03:54, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

Taking a photograph of a historical artifact does not make your photograph a historical artifact itself. You uploaded the image under the GFDL, and in doing so, explicitely allow people to edit it mercilessly. You should let go any expectation that your image will remain unmodified and you should never use the word "vandalized" as you did in your edit summary. I believe removing the flare (whether you want to do it yourself or just accept the existing alternative) is the best choice for a high-quality article. This is especially true considering the image is thumb-nailed. -- Netoholic @ 04:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
You did not respond to my argument on the merits. As any professionally trained historian knows (and I studied history with one of the top three history departments in the United States), photos of historical artifacts are part of the historical record since they may be the only record that an object even existed if the original is ever destroyed (due to fire, vandalism, plane crashes, car accidents, accidental drops, war, terrorism, and so on). For example, hundreds of artworks that have been lost (in World War II, for example) are known only through photographs. This is why it's so important to not retouch photos. There is a very famous passage in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting about the guy who was airbrushed out of all the photos in all the history books in Czechoslovakia, so that the only indicator in the books of his existence was the hat he put on another guy's head.
Second, I'm sorry to have to directly confront you this way, but are you actually physically capable of seeing that the edited photo has a big gray unnatural solid spot in the middle of it? I mean, do you see it? I can see it quite clearly in both the expanded and thumbnailed versions. And yes, I have looked at the photo on several other computers as well and I saw it on those.
Any photo with a weird big gray alien splotch in the middle is not high quality. That is amateur quality! If you truly care about making sure that this is a "high-quality article," you would concede that an amateurish photo edit is inconsistent with that goal.
Finally, I am not going to remove the flare because (1) it would be inconsistent with my strong personal conviction that history ought to be transmitted in the most neutral, realistic, coherent and truthful manner and (2) I am out of practice with regard to retouching, which I have not dabbled in since I was in college. --Coolcaesar 16:56, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
Here we go again. Some anon IP user had fixed WWW and related articles to point to the original copy, FirstWebServer.jpg, and then Netaholic just went and overrode that edit so that all those articles are showing the edited copy. Can we please PLEASE engage in a reasonable debate here? I don't want to take this minor matter to mediation or arbitration, though I will if I have to (I just successfully prosecuted a request for arbitration against Ericsaindon2, after I and about ten other users became totally fed up with his edit warring over the Anaheim Hills, Anaheim, California article).--Coolcaesar 01:58, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
Okay, no response after two weeks. I am changing it back. --Coolcaesar 21:21, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Boring intro

The intro section is far too low-key and techical, and conveys no sense that the Web is the nost important and revolutionary development in communications technology since the invention of television, and probably since the printing press. Could someone with some expertise in the social importance of the Web contribute some material? Adam 07:28, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, that's a rather subjective judgment. While most people (myself included) would probably agree, it needs to be backed up by citations to some of the major pundits like Alvin Toffler. To clarify the issues: I personally think the Web is the biggest development in publishing technology (one-to-many) since the invention of the printing press, while e-mail is the biggest development in communications technology since the invention of the telephone. --Coolcaesar 05:29, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

OK well I will write something myself if no-one else will, although it won't have anything to do with the charlatan Toffler. Also, what is this WWW "historical logo"? I've never seen it before. What is its orgin and status? Adam 16:10, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, if you're going to rewrite the intro, you need to make sure that your edits comply with core Wikipedia content policies. Please read Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, and Wikipedia:No original research. Please review Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration to see what happens to editors who fail to cooperate with these policies. For an example of a properly researched article, see my work at Lawyer.
As for the logo, it was used, if I recall correctly, for the WWW project around 1994-1995. --Coolcaesar 18:22, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BBC

I once heard that the BBC found out that they had some obscure patent on linking between files that happened to cover the WWW, but decided not to claim rights to the WWW. Any truth in that? DirkvdM 07:00, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Never heard of it. The only British patent I've heard of is the British Telecom patent, but a district court judge in New York dismissed the BT case against SBC and BT decided to not appeal. --Coolcaesar 02:15, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] adding our site

Hello

Would like to have www.recruitsoffshore.com added to your site.

Under Countries Available we have descriptions about a good number of countries where we added a link to your site

I hope i am not doing this step in error if so please remove our post and apologise for the inconvenience caused

Thanks

80.71.54.11 11:31, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Website" and "Web site" capitalised?

Is this correct? I have never seen it before, including on Wikipedia, but apparently it is ?? -- Chuq 20:48, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the World Wide Web is name, like "Internet." It is therefore capitalized, like all names. The internationally recognized official Web standards are established and published by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C and can be found at the site www.w3.org. It must be acknowledged that the standard (i.e correct) is always a capitalized W whenever referring to the World Wide Web in any form, including: Web, Web site, Web page, Web server, etc. (See Web Site (spelling) and its discussion as well.) ~ UBeR 01:27, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
That may be an official standard, but it is certainly not common usage. Take a look at current usage with a google news search for "website". -- Chuq 00:07, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, it is. Compare http://news.google.com/news?q=%22web%20site%22 to the link you posted (that is, the number of results).
In addition, from the discussion at Web Site:
[claim] 7. Somehow common malpractice in public forums represents justification for further neglect, abuse, or malpractice, particularly abandoning widely accepted standards.
[Answer]: False. All over the Web and in interpersonal communications, there are accelrating occurences of individuals failing to use capitalization, punctuation, or even automated spell-checking. that doesn't make it tolerable acceptable beneficial admirable or even comprehensible does it do you intend to emulate that common practice as well
~ UBeR 01:32, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I just checked Google News at news.google.com. There are 51,700 hits for "website" and 89,700 hits for "Web site." Clearly Web site is the more common usage. I also noticed that "Web site" is much more common in the United States. This is one of those differences between British English and American English. --Coolcaesar 04:19, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, we're pretty 'uneducated' over here. But we're happy enough; we get things done - and we certainly do exist. :-) --Nigelj 19:04, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
No, you've missed my point. I'll take it out though, if that's all you'll ever focus on. My point was, Web site is common usage among the educated. That does not necessarily suggest those who do not write it as so are uneducated. ~ UBeR 20:11, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ad surfing

This may have something to do with the phrase, if someone wants to do the research: [5] ~~helix84 12:42, 16 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] where did the end of the article go?

the caching sectioned petered out mid-sentence. I looked for, but didn't find, a version to safely revert to with the complete article. In the absebce of anything better I tidied up by removing the final sentence / para, so at least it stops with a full-stop, not mid-sentence. However, this is very unsatisfactory. Does anyone remember what it used to say, and can revert to a fuller version? raining girl 17:24, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

S/he may have been experimenting or just vandalising, but the article was mostly wrecked by a user at 68.189.124.92 between 17:11 and 17:15 today. The only interesting edit since then was Raining girl changing the number 4 to the word four. I hope I've restored it OK - if I've missed anything useful, please add it back too :-) --Nigelj 19:11, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Basic Terms

The article lists four basic terms or concepts that allow the web as we know it to function: hypertext, markup, the client/server model, and "resource identifiers." Because the majority of humans alive today understand the concept of a URL and are very comfortable with the notion, having used them "hands on" in the address bar every day. A URI and a URL are not the same thing, but the concept is very similar. 71.216.188.161 23:44, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

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