Talk:World Wide Web

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 Definition:  A global collection of information presented in the form of documents hosted on networked computers and available to the public. [d] [e]
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 Workgroup category:  Computers [Categories OK]
 Talk Archive:  none  English language variant:  British English

Technical details

I have re-written the "How the web works" section to be a more understandable high-level description. I will put the technical details about the DNS, TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, etc back into the article some time soon. Not quite sure where they should go, maybe a sub-category under "how the web works", but I just thought it was important to give a simple description first rather than throwing a whole lot of terminology at the reader.--Konstantin Tchernov 07:36, 17 January 2007 (CST)

I have to agree with you on that decision. Personally, I think a lot of the technical stuff can go into the separate articles, with only a brief discussion here about what they do. If this is to be targetted for a non-CS-majoring college freshman, they just need to know what CSS, HTML, DNS, and HTTP are. They don't need to know POST vs. GET or user agents. --ZachPruckowski 11:51, 17 January 2007 (CST)

Major problems

What I see that is majorly wrong here (just a very brief quick list):

  1. Dreadful structure - order of sections is ridiculous
  2. No in-line citations and hardly any references
  3. Poor prose, does not flow. Some inconsistent writing style. Sometimes boring and technical sometimes full of unnecessary flowery words like "dispersed around the planet in time and space"
  4. The "basic terms" section is rather strange, I think if needed these terms should be defined in other places as they are mentioned.--Konstantin Tchernov 08:21, 17 January 2007 (CST)

Question: would a better article result more quickly if you were to (1) blank the article, and then (2) write a new one that lacks the above enumerated problems, while using the WP article (linked handily from our own article) as a rough guide? I ask out of curiosity. I know that's how I feel about the Philosophy article... --Larry Sanger 08:51, 17 January 2007 (CST)

I am not sure. Personally, that's what I did with the "How it works" section. Very tempting to blank some of these other sections too. But it is a lot of work rewriting them from scratch - I am not sure that I personally have the time/motivation for that.--Konstantin Tchernov 05:52, 18 January 2007 (CST)

Well, whatever works best for you. You can begin with the WP article if you wish, and you can start with a blank section or a blank article if you wish! --Larry Sanger 11:02, 18 January 2007 (CST)

I'm cleaning on this

Hi yall. I'm tearing into this, deleting portions and trying to achieve some kind of actual focus. The legacy of stuff brought from Wikipedia is, in my opinion, "too much detail" and "not enough vision". I think we should describe the web here--what it is, and what it's underlying technology is, but it's technology should not be explained here--technology things should go into their own separate articles. Thus I added links to the standards but removed areas that got into trying to tell what the standards do in a nuts and bolts kind of way.Pat Palmer 16:00, 4 April 2007 (CDT)

Article name?

I've almost always seen this written with all-caps, i.e. "World Wide Web". See, e.g., the WWW Consortium web site. Any reason we have it at the lower-case version? J. Noel Chiappa 20:45, 15 April 2008 (CDT)

I would go further. I protest the dropping of capitalization of both WWW and Internet. There is only one Internet, but there are many intranets. There is only one Web: it is all documents accessible from the Internet via Web browsers; however, intranets may have their own webs. Not all webs connect to to other webs. I'm glad to see that User:Eric_M_Gearhart chose to capitalize the word when he created the Internet article. -- Tim Chambers 11:25, 9 May 2008 (CDT)
Although I've seen it as "Web" instead of "web", that seems very German to me. I see no particular reason to capitalize it. From the context of the article, it is clear that "the web" means "the world wide web", so I see no need for additional emphasis by capitalizing it as well.Pat Palmer 16:42, 9 May 2008 (CDT)
Ahem. The IETF (see, for instance, the HTTP spec), the RFC Editor and the W3C all use all-caps. They do disagree slightly, in that the IETF sometimes uses "World-Wide Web", and the W3C uses "World Wide Web", but I see no reason to ignore what the relevant expert bodies feel is the appropriate terminology. J. Noel Chiappa 07:48, 28 May 2008 (CDT)

removed a reference

This one: <ref>Halsal p. 359, 568</ref> seems to me to be both incomplete and unnecessary. It is not controversial that things like email are not part of HTTP; they are clearly recognized as distinct internet "applications", and as such, I see no need for a reference to prove it. Also, who or what is "Halsal"? If someone disagrees, let's talk about it.Pat Palmer 16:39, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

Robert Calliau (or Cailliau)

Is not, to my knowledge, considered by a majority of people to have been a co-inventor of "the web", although he did (as did quite a few people) work on hypertext-related technology at the time. SGML and hypertext were "hot" about then; I knew people at Bell Laboratories who also worked on SGML-like things. But Berners-Lee was the one who put it all together in a simple way and made it work. If someone feels this is incorrect, please bring evidence. In the meantime, I am removing this sentence: The primary authors and first implementers of the above standards were Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau of CERN. given that Calliau is not an author any of the RFC's underlying world wide web technology.Pat Palmer 17:09, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

does semantic web really belong in this article?

I doubt that it does. Just because it has the word "web" in it doesn't mean that it is really related. If I understand it (which I'm not totally sure I do), a semantic web does have something in common with hypertext or markup, but it probably belongs more in mathematics or linguistics. So for now, I'm removing the header as a placeholder.Pat Palmer 17:24, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

need for cleanup again

I think sections 4 and 5 probably need to be combined, and somewhat rewritten. They have grown a bit long and stringy. I'd like to get it as short as possible and more elegant than it currently is. We also need a paragraph about Mosaic, the first publicly available web browser. But later; I have to quit now.Pat Palmer 17:21, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

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