Exercise 3.3 -- Internet/WWW

Through this exercise, I realised my understanding of the Internet's inherent technologies and information architectures was poor. As a digital native, the exponential growth of the Web in the 1990s and 2000s has changed the way I think and work (Prensky, 2001) but I knew little about the underlying technologies driving it.

This week, I read 'Weaving the Web' by Tim Berners-Lee, which broadened my understanding of the history of the Internet. HTML was designed to, "convey the structure of a hypertext document, but not details of its presentation." (Berners-Lee, 1999, p.45) Many web authors are guilty of using semantic tags for presentation, and in the late 1990s it was common to see tables used as navigational aids (Chapman, 2009). Using a limited set of tags taught me sticking to semantic tags is best practice as presentational tags can bloat file size, limit a user's control over how web pages are displayed, and are not supported by older browsers. Semantic tags also aid the creation of accessible HTML documents, for example the ALT tag can be used to provide visually impaired users with audio descriptions of hyperlinks. Working with a limited set of semantic tags and manually checking pages is vital as even valid HTML documents are displayed differently on different browsers. The index page uploaded to my WebSpace is XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.

The Web is dynamic, and continually evolving. Ideas of Web 3.0 are beginning to emerge, as is the semantic web, where information will deliver itself to us (Berners-Lee, 1999). Similar ideas were described by Bush (1945) in his concept of the Memex, and I feel the ideas he espoused are still relevant today. The first web server outside of CERN was encouraged by a librarian, Louise Addis (Henderson, 2000) and librarians and information professionals have a tradition of being at the forefront of digital information technologies. Remaining so is vital to educate people on how best to use them for finding, managing and organising digital information.