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.
Fifteen years after the invention the web, Wired stated in its August
2005 issue that less than half of the web was commercial, with the
other half being run by passion. As for the internet, according to the
French daily Le Monde dated 19 August 2005, its three powers --
ubiquity, variety and interactivity -- made its potential use quasi
infinite.
Robert Beard, a language teacher at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania,
and the founder of A Web of Online Dictionaries in 1995, wrote as early
as September 1998: "The web will be an encyclopedia of the world by the
world for the world. There will be no information or knowledge that
anyone needs that will not be available. The major hindrance to
international and interpersonal understanding, personal and
institutional enhancement, will be removed. It would take a wilder
imagination than mine to predict the effect of this development on the
nature of humankind."
1991 > FROM ASCII TO UNICODE
[Summary]
Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code
for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for
information interchange in English. It was published in 1963 by ANSI
(American National Standards Institute). With the internet spreading
worldwide, to communicate in English (and Latin) was not enough
anymore. The accented characters of several European languages and
characters of some other languages were taken into account from 1986
onwards with 8-bit variants of ASCII, also called extended ASCII, that
provided sets of 256 characters. But problems were not over until the
publication of Unicode in January 1991 as a new universal encoding
system. Unicode provided "a unique number for every character, no
matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what
the language", and could handle 65,000 characters or ideograms.
***
With the internet spreading worldwide, the use of ASCII and extended
ASCII was not enough anymore, thus the need to take into account all
languages with Unicode, whose first version was published in January
1991.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account