World Wide Web

Read the following words and word combinations and use them for understanding and translation of the text:

to retrieve - восстанавливать, извлекать

to overshadow - затмевать

to dispense - распределять, раздавать

auction - аукцион

to emerge - появляться, проявляться

remote, distant - отдаленный

highlighted links - выделенные ссылки

to handle with - обращаться с чем-то, трактовать

burgeon - росток, почка

entrepreneur - предприниматель

estimate – оценка

to improve - улучшать

profitability - прибыльность, доходность

community - сообщество, объединение

resilient - эластичный, жизнерадостный

to constrain - вынуждать, сдерживать

adaptable - легко приспособляющийся

challenge - задача, проблема, вызов

to redefine - переопределить

By the beginning of the 1990s, the Internet had become well established as a means of communication between relatively advanced computer users, particularly scientists, engineers, and computer science students—primarily using UNIX-based systems. A number of services used the Internet protocol to carry messages or data. These included e-mail, file transfer protocol and newsgroups.

A Wide Area Information Service (WAIS) even provided a protocol for users to retrieve information from databases on remote hosts. Another interesting service, Gopher, was developed at the University of Minnesota in 1991. It used a system of nested menus to organize documents at host sites so they could be browsed and retrieved by remote users. Gopher was quite popular for a few years, but it was soon overshadowed by a rather different kind of networked information service.

A physicist/programmer working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, devised in 1989 a system that he eventually called the World Wide Web (sometimes called WWW or W3). By 1990, he was running a prototype system and demonstrating it for CERN researchers and a few outside participants.

The Web consists essentially of three parts. Berners-Lee devised a markup language: that is, a system for indicating document elements (such as headers), text characteristics, and so on. Any document could be linked to another by specifying that document’s unique address (called a Uniform Resource Locator or URL) in a request. Berners-Lee defined the HyperText Transport Protocol, or HTTP, to handle the details needed to retrieve documents. (Although HTTP is most often used to retrieve HTmL-formatted Web documents, it can also be used to specify documents using other protocols, such as ftp, news, or gopher.) A program responds to requests for documents sent over the network (usually the Internet, that is, TCP/IP). The requests are issued by a client program as a result of the user clicking on highlighted links or buttons or specifying addresses. The browser in turn interprets the HTmL codes on the page to display it correctly on the user’s screen.

At first the Web had only text documents. However, thanks to Berners-Lee’s flexible design, improved Web browsers could be created and used with the Web as long as they followed the rules for HTTP. The most successful of these new browsers was Mosaic, created by Marc Andreesen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. NCSA mosaic was available for free download and could run on Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX-based systems. Mosaic not only dispensed with the text commands used by most of the first browsers, but it also had the ability to display graphics and play sound files. With Mosaic the text-only hypertext of the early Web rapidly became a richer hypermedia experience. And thanks to the ability of browsers to accept modules to handle new kinds of files, the Web could also accommodate real-time sound and video transmissions.

In 1994, Andreessen left NCSA and co-founded a company called Netscape Communications, which improved and commercialized Mosaic. Microsoft soon entered with a competitor, Internet Explorer; today these two browsers dominate the market with Microsoft having taken the lead. Together with relatively low-cost Internet access these user-friendly Web browsers brought the Web (and thus the underlying Internet) to the masses. Schools and libraries began to offer Web access while workplaces began to use internal webs to organize information and organize operations.

Meanwhile, companies such as the on-line bookseller Amazon.com demonstrated new ways to deliver traditional products, while the on-line auction site eBay took advantage of the unique characteristics of the on-line medium to redefine the auction. The burgeoning Web was soon offering millions of pages, especially as entrepreneurs began to find additional business opportunities in the new medium. Two services emerged to help Web users make sense of the flood of information. Today users can search for words or phrases or browse through structured topical listings. Estimates from various sources suggest that as of 2007 approximately 1.2 billion people worldwide access the Web, with usage increasing most rapidly in the emerging industrial super- powers of India and China.

The Web is rapidly emerging as an important news medium. The medium combines the ability of broadcasting to reach many people from one point with the ability to customize content to each person’s preferences. Traditional broadcasting and publishing are constrained by limited resources and the need for profitability, and thus the range and diversity of views made available tend to be limited. With the Web, anyone with a PC and a connection to a service provider can put up a Web site and say just about anything. Millions of people now display aspects of their lives and interests on their personal Web pages. The Web has also provided a fertile medium for the creation of online communities while contributing to significant issues. As the new century continues, the Web is proving itself to be truly worldwide, resilient, and adaptable to many new communications and media technologies. Nevertheless, the Web faces legal and political challenges as well as technical challenges.

Notes:

By the beginning of the 1990s – к началу тысяча девяностых

UNIX - операционная система, существующая во многих вариантах

Gopher - сетевой протокол распределенного поиска и пере­дачи документов, широко распространенный в интернете до 1993 года.

CERN – ЦЕРН (Европейский центр ядерных исследований)

Headers - заголовки, сопровождающие сообщения для свя­зывания ячеек между собой.

Hypermedia - главные средства массовой информации.

HTTP - HyperText Transport Protocol

URL - Uniform Resource Locator

NCSA - National Center for Supercomputing Applications