Chapter 1. Getting Started

1.1. History

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.