The Internet has always contained a variety of protocols for
exchanging information, but when web browsers such as NCSA Mosaic
and, later, Netscape Navigator appeared, they spurred an explosive
growth. In the last six years, the number of web hosts alone has
grown from under a thousand to more than ten million. Now, when
people hear the term Internet, most think of the Web. Other
protocols, such as those for email, FTP, chat, and news, certainly
remain popular, but they have become secondary to the Web, as more
people are using web sites as their gateway to access these other
services.
The Web was by no means the first technology available for publishing
and exchanging information, but there was something different about
the Web that prompted its explosive growth. We'd love to tell
you that CGI was the sole factor for the Web's early growth
over protocols like FTP and Gopher. But that wouldn't be true.
Probably the real reason the Web gained popularity initially was
because it came with pictures. The Web was designed to present
multiple forms of media: browsers supported inlined images almost
from the start, and HTML supported rudimentary layout control that
made information easier to present and read. This control continued
to increase as Netscape added support for new extensions to HTML with
each successive release of the browser.
Thus initially, the Web grew into a collection of personal home pages
and assorted web sites containing a variety of miscellaneous
information. However, no one really knew what to
do with it, especially businesses. In 1995, a
common refrain in corporations was "Sure the Internet is great,
but how many people have actually made money online?" How
quickly things change.