The Web–Some Software for the Hardware

The Universal Creature

Long ago (back when insects could talk), there lived a spider of unusually bright intellect named Tim. After watching the ants working all day, Tim met up with the lead ant at the time, Bill.

The ants, as usual, were incredibly successful at gathering and storing food, but Tim thought the spiders could team up with the ants to make life easier for both groups. Tim approached Bill with this plan, and Bill saw the logic in it. In fact, Bill suggested that they incorporate other creatures into the workgroups as well. Soon, Tim and Bill recruited grasshoppers, flies, and earthworms to become partners in the food-gathering venture. The creatures thought it was a splendid idea, so they got together and created an elaborate labyrinth of anthills, spiderwebs, burrows, and tunnels to assist in the food gathering venture.

The system was in place; it looked perfect; it was time for the work to begin. But, much to the creatures' disappointment, chaos ensued. Even though all the paths and connections were in place, flies had a hard time navigating the tunnels, grasshoppers had difficulty staying in line, earthworms were just too heavy to walk across the spiderwebs, and, of course, the ants' expectations were much too high for any of the other creature groups to meet.

What the creatures had was a network. What the creatures needed was something or someone who could cross all mediums of the network safely. They needed a universal creature.

This shorter-than-short story provides a good analogy of the Internet-Web relationship. The Internet is the infrastructure for transmitting information—an infrastructure made up of computers, routers, cables, telephone lines, modems, high-speed data circuits, and information bases called servers (rather than anthills, spiderwebs, and tunnels). Unfortunately, just as spiderwebs can't support earthworms, not all computers can support all computer file formats. To include every available method (or protocol) for understanding the various document formats on all computers would be impractical. So the Internet community devised its own universal creature, more commonly known as the World Wide Web.

Initially, Tim Berners-Lee conceived and developed the Web at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland for the high-energy physics community. (By the way, although Tim is considered to be of extremely high intellect, he is not a spider!). The Web quickly attracted a great deal of attention and spread beyond the physics arena. For our purposes, though, you only need to know that the Internet is the hardware and the Web is the software. Simple enough.