# How the web started
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee networked documents using hypertext. In 1990, he developed the first HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) server and the first web browser. In 1991, the web was operational and made the internet accessible to all. Hypertext links allowed us to move from one textual or visual document to another with a simple click of the mouse. Information became interactive, thus more attractive to many users. Later on, this interactivity was further enhanced with hypermedia links that could link texts and images with video and sound.
Developed by NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) at the University of Illinois (USA) and distributed free of charge in November 1993, Mosaic was the first browser for the general public, and contributed greatly to the development of the web. In early 1994, part of the Mosaic team migrated to the Netscape Communications Corporation to develop a new browser called Netscape Navigator. In 1995, Microsoft launched its own browser, the Internet Explorer. Other browsers were launched then, like Opera and Safari, Apple's browser.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October 1994 to develop interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, other tools) for the web, for example specifications for markup languages (HTML, XML and others). It also acted as a forum for information, commerce, communication and collective understanding. In 1998, the section Internationalization/Localization gave access to some protocols for creating a multilingual website: HTML, base character set, new tags and attributes, HTTP, language negotiation, URLs and other identifiers including non-ASCII characters, etc.
# Tim Berners-Lee’s dream
Pierre Ruetschi, a journalist for the Swiss daily “Tribune de Genève”, asked Tim Berners-Lee on 20 December 1997: "Seven years later, are you satisfied with the way the web has evolved?". He answered that, if he was pleased with the richness and diversity of information, the web still lacked the power planned in its original design. He would like "the web to be more interactive, and people to be able to create information together", and not only to be information consumers. The web was supposed to become a "medium for collaboration, a world of knowledge that we share."
In an essay posted on his webpage, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in May 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together." (excerpt from "The World Wide Web: A very short personal history")
# The web 2.0
According to Netcraft, a company tracking data on the internet, the number of websites went from one million (April 1997) to 10 million (February 2000), 20 million (September 2000), 30 million (July 2001), 40 million (April 2003), 50 million (May 2004), 60 million (March 2005), 70 million (August 2005), 80 million (April 2006), 90 million (August 2006) and 100 million (November 2006), with a growing number of personal websites and blogs.
The term “web 2.0” was invented in 2004 by Tim O’Reilly, a publisher of computer books, as a title for a series of conferences he was organizing. The web 2.0 may begin to answer Tim Berners-Lee’s dream as a web based on community and sharing, with many collaborative projects across borders and languages.