Web Era

The Web era opens with the proposal drafted in March 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, "Information Management: A Proposal", and culminates in the publication of the first site info.cern.ch on 20 December 1990, followed by the release of the technology into the public domain on 30 April 1993 — a founding act that guaranteed the universality of the network. HTTP, HTML and URL, designed by Berners-Lee with Robert Cailliau, formed the technical triptych of a worldwide web layered over the Internet. The appearance of the Mosaic graphical browser in 1993, developed by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA, and then of Netscape Navigator in 1994, gave the Web its consumer face. The period that followed saw the birth of the digital economy: Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, Amazon in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, eBay in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar, Google in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford with the PageRank algorithm, Wikipedia in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sun Microsystems released Java in 1995, promising "write once, run anywhere"; Brendan Eich designed JavaScript at Netscape in ten days the same year. The W3C, founded by Berners-Lee in 1994 at MIT, standardised HTML 4 (1997), CSS1 (1996) and XML (1998). The 1995–2000 dot-com bubble, its excesses and its burst in March 2000, left behind a massive infrastructure (fibre, data centres) that would feed the next stage. Linus Torvalds released Git in 2005, a tool that would unify open-source collaboration. This first Web era was dominated by an editorial model: authors published, visitors read. Pages were static, interactions limited to server-side forms. The turn toward the participatory was already announced from 2002 by the emergence of blogs (Blogger 1999, WordPress 2003) and wikis. The arrival of Gmail in 2004, making heavy use of XMLHttpRequest and foreshadowing Ajax, closed the period by opening that of Web 2.0, in which the user would become co-author of the content and applications would rival desktop software.