The Story of the Web
The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) was not looking to create the world’s biggest techno-social phenomenon, but it was in fact here, in the late 80s that Tim Berners-Lee grappled with an acute problem. Scientific research often involves a large number of references to other works and so as you moved from one paper to the next following a logical link, there was a lot of hunting of the relevant papers involved. Even if you hypothetically put all the relevant research in an electronic format in the same hard drive, it would still take a lot of effort to locate a reference in another paper. Berners-Lee’s vision was to create a standard language for linking them physically so you could go straight from one document to a specific part of another, creating what he envisioned as a web of documents. Berners-Lee had already created a hypertext system “Enquire” in 1980, for his personal use.
The mid 80s saw the evolution of the domain name system for naming computers on the Internet—using a domain name server and the now ubiquitous format starting with www and ending with .com. But hypertext models were still proprietary and computer specific. Berners-Lee created a standard protocol—the HyperText Transfer Protocol and an accompanying language—HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Sir Tim-Berners Lee’s greatest gift was to open-source HTTP/HTML and for this he will always be remembered the father of the World Wide Web, and the man who gave the digital revolution its first language.
It’s just about three decades since the World Wide Web was born, and the first dot.com successes such as Netscape and Mozilla were created. Since then, it’s been re-engineered, retooled, turbocharged by broadband, set free by mobile devices, and commercially reinvented more than once. Today, a business website is only noteworthy if it doesn’t exist. Websites deliver customers, commerce, and brand messages. But behind the sites themselves, the Web has become the de facto utility on which almost every other digital solution is built. Whether we are watching movies on Netflix or sharing photos on Facebook, storing files on Dropbox or using collaboration tools such as Trello, reading magazines online or banking online, we are using the Web. And whatever you do in the digital world, it’s more than likely that the World Wide Web will continue to be a part of your portfolio of interfaces.
Web Technologies Keep Evolving
When you load a web page from an ecommerce website today, a vast array of services and systems are at play behind the screen. The simple HTML page envisioned by Berners Lee has long been replaced by a combination of programmatically generated commercial data and content. Extensible Markup Language (XML) enabled more versatile web pages, while Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) dramatically improved the formatting and control over layout. HTML5, the most recent evolution of the original HTML standard, absorbs a lot of the capabilities of XML and CSS, and also enables much better use of multimedia content.
As browsers have matured and evolved, they can access more computing power and memory. The amount of logic that can be handled within the browser has also increased. JavaScript in many flavors is now almost universally used for the front-end development of Web applications. But the complexity of individual web pages is also much higher. The use of Asynchronous JavaScript And XML (AJAX) allows individual bits of pages to be refreshed without refreshing the whole page. You may have seen picture galleries or conditional forms that refresh subsequent fields based on choices made, again without reloading the full page. Additionally, jQuery is increasingly used for generating more interactive and rich front-end interfaces.
This collection of Web technologies and development tools defined broadly by browser-based access and Web architectures is also critical to the way companies are increasingly running internal processes and functions. Web architectures are by design loosely coupled, so they allow for ongoing evolution and running repairs and upgrades. Original Web architectures used a natural separation of front end (interface and experience) and back end (data and processing, broadly speaking). You may have come across terms like MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node) or the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python). Both of these are essentially combinations of coding, database, and design frameworks. Both are open source and have millions of technologists and supporters who all believe in the principle of sharing. As a result, these technologies continue to be free but have evolved very quickly into highly robust toolkits.
Websites are now responsive by design. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile phone and tablet models with a range of form factors, websites need to be ready for any size of screens and still perform adequately—which means that the design and content need to be elegant and with very little loss of experience. A responsive website will mold itself to any device and will intelligently reorganize content to ensure that it is always readable. An adaptive website is similar but will work toward a few predefined sizes.
The Business of the Web
Most of us recognize the Web today as a confluence of communication channels and virtual marketplaces. It has become the de facto way of conducting business for many organizations and a preferred way of shopping by millions of customers worldwide, with the browser as its primary interface. Yet, the Web is still evolving, and it’s worth taking note of some of the more recent evolutionary steps that the Web and browsers have taken.
Workspaces, Not Windows
Thanks to the increased bandwidth and computing power available within the browser, multimedia content and interactive content, and video, have all become commonplace, within the browser. The browser has been described as the “operating system of the Internet.” This is especially vivid when you think about using tools such as Google Docs, which allow you to run the entire office productivity suite inside a browser with no installed software. Rather than being just a tool for viewing web pages, the browser is in fact now a workspace that integrates you to the Web. Google Chrome is by a margin the most popular browser today, and it comes with a lot of extensible options—buttons and links you can add to make regular tasks easier—from bookmarking content or blocking ads. The browser is a critical productivity environment if used correctly. Tools like Evernote, which has 25 million users, can work almost within the browser as well as via a desktop application.
Tip: As far as possible, a version of your service should be available to access and consume from a browser.
Monopolies, Not Perfect Competition
The Web has played its role in blurring national borders. Goods and services flow freely across the world today even at a consumer level, because of the democratic access to the Internet and low barriers of entry. This is why, a businesswoman sitting in Spain can hire a college graduate in Singapore via a platform built and owned by an American company to do online research on price comparisons. This irreverence for borders has played a big role in creating a single global market mentality in many categories. Some would argue that this democracy of information and low cost of entry creates a good approximation of perfect competition. Yet ironically, the Web has created a monopolistic model because in this single global market with free flow of information, why would anybody go to the second-best option? Bear in mind that China apart, we now effectively have a dominant global search engine, a dominant global social network, and a globally dominant ecommerce provider. The idea of a long tail as a commercial model may be replaced by a very long tail as a meagre sustainment of an esoteric fringe. I believe that regulation permitting, it is likely that high street banking, or retail utilities could all end up with similar market structures with one or two players dominating a market. Tim Wu in his book The Master Switch1 talks about the recurrent pattern where every new communications technology—such as the telegraph or the Internet, starts out with the promise of a brave new world of democratizing content but ends up with a monopolistic model.
Tip: In a digital industry, you need to be among the top two players in your market.
Gray, Deep, and Dark
We’ve come to think about the Web as an open and searchable environment, but it’s worth keeping in mind that overwhelmingly large parts of the Web are not visible to us. There are plenty of sites that opt out of search engines and block crawlers. This is often referred to as the deep web. Recent regulations in Europe around the right to be forgotten have created another gray area about what can and will be found on search engines. The deep web accounts for 90 percent of the Web, with the visible or surface web that we all use regularly just form 10 percent. The deep web includes mostly techno-legal content and systems that just don’t want to be accessed by the average public user. This would include database servers that serve ecommerce websites, and government-sensitive content for example. Then there’s the dark web. This is specifically a part of the deep web that is designed for anonymity and managed through special (Tor) servers and clients. This is the part of the Web that is extremely secretive by choice and is used therefore both for activists who value privacy above all and for nefarious purposes beyond the reach of the law. It is highly unlikely that your business model needs to consider the dark net, unless you work in law enforcement, espionage, crime, or quasi legal areas. Or perhaps on the engineering of the dark net itself. But it’s worthwhile recognizing the deep and gray areas of the Internet, at the very least, from a security perspective.
The Digital Supermarket
The Web is also evolving as we speak. More sensors are being connected to the Web, and more data will be openly available for merging with your own and creating new meaning. In this sense, the Web is a giant digital supermarket. Because it’s not just data, but services and functionalities, which you can consume or combine with tools, that are all available off the Web. You can visit a survey tool, a video streaming site, or a calendar online. But you can also create a single page using these individual functionalities by simply letting these services connect through your page. This makes the Web a giant box of components. I would argue that a lot of organizations need to curtail their natural response to develop new functionality and write new code. Instead, the first step should be to see how far you can get by assembling existing bits of functionality and code, and once you have an initial prototype or beta version, you can then explore the option of rewriting key missing bits or those areas that are critical to your service and can be improved upon.
Tip: Always start by exploring what you can pick and combine from existing services, rather than write new code.
Awaiting Web 3.0
All that happened between the initial dial-up Internet and restrictive browser experience, and today’s broadband-friendly rich media websites, as I’ve described is roughly known as Web 2.0. A simple way of classifying the stages of the Web is as follows: 1.0 was the read-only Web. 2.0 was all about read, write, and operate. So, what will Web 3.0 bring?
A number of technologies are staking claim to be the definitive basis for Web 3.0. Tim Berners Lee started the discussion around the semantic web, which understands context. For example, when you search for Vertigo, are you searching for the condition or the film? Or when you’re looking for a restaurant called Chinatown, are you able to get past the film reviews and the street maps in your city? This is intrinsically connected with how your data is stored and used. Sir Tim’s current venture is called Solid and deals with this problem. Web 3.0 is also going to be driven via the IOT wave, so an order of magnitude more connections will be made. Your car, or your oven, or your mattress may all be endpoints for Web 3.0. This is the vision of IOT as we know it. In recent times, it feels like the Blockchain and Crypto community will dominate the Web 3.0 discourse. If they are right, Web 3.0 will be distributed, secure, and transaction-driven, with a closer approximation to the immersive cyberspace concept envisioned by William Gibson.2 This table is a useful way to understand the past and future of the Web.
Figure 2.1 Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, an overview