Oreilly Free ebook : Web Client Programming with Perl

If you don't know what the Web is, you probably picked up the wrong book. But here's some history and background, just to make sure we're all coming from the same place.

The World Wide Web was developed in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee at the Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN). The inspiration behind it was simply to find a way to share results of experiments in high-energy particle physics. The central technology behind the Web was the ability to link from a document on one server to a document on another, keeping the actual location and access method of the documents invisible to the user. Certainly not the sort of thing that you'd expect to start a media circus.

So what did start the media circus? In 1993 a graphical interface to the Web, named Mosaic, was developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At first, Mosaic ran only on UNIX systems running the X Window System, a platform that was popular with academics but unknown to practically anyone else. Yet anyone who saw Mosaic in action knew immediately that this was big news. Soon afterwards, Mac and PC versions came out, and the Web started to become immensely popular. Suddenly the buzzwords started proliferating: Information Superhighway, Internet, the Web, Mosaic, etc. (For a while all these words were used interchangeably, much to the chagrin of anyone who had been using the Internet for years.)

In 1994, a new interface to the Web called Netscape Navigator came on the (free) market, and quickly became the darling of the Net. Meanwhile, everyone and their Big Blue Brother started developing their own web sites, with no one quite sure what the Web was best used for, but convinced that they couldn't be left behind.

Most of the confusion has died down now, but not the excitement. The Web seems to have permanently captured the imagination of the world. It brings up visions of vast archives that can now be made globally available from every desktop, images and multimedia that can be distributed to every home, and... money, money, money. But the soul of the Web is pure and unchanged. When you get down to it, it's just about sending data from one machine to another--and that's what HTTP is for.