A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n

The Future of Networking Technologies in Learning

Appendix
The Rise of Publishing on the Internet:
A History

Susan Mernit
Editor
New Jersey Online

1. The Internet--From the Academy to the Mainstream

Most World Wide Web users have already heard the stories about how the Internet was first built in the 1960s by the military as a fail-safe communications network in case the United States needed to launch missiles against the USSR. It gradually evolved, first into a research network linking up the academic and military scientific communities, and then into a global network of mostly university-based e-mail users who spanned the globe. By the early '90s, the Internet, and soon the WWW, had caught the interest of journalists, business people, and other professionals who were attracted to a medium that offers a fast, low-cost means to access and exchange information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In 1991-92, researchers at the University of Minnesota developed Gopher, an Internet menu application that gave a user the ability to view hierarchical lists of contents of computer directories by topic, then press a key to transfer items from those directories to the hard drive of her own computer.

This new technology, which gave users the ability to post files into simple directories that could be searched and viewed worldwide without using arcane Unix tools, motivated many organizations to publish and present information on the Internet for the first time. The Clinton White House, the Environmental Protection Agency, the New Republic magazine, and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) were among the first to compile Gopher directories of non-technical, non-scientific information intended to reach a more mainstream public.

Between 1991 and 1993, the number of Gopher directories listed in the master lists maintained by the University of Minnesota rose almost 200 percent. New Gophers were launched every week by enthusiastic Internet users, encouraged both by Gopher's ease of use and by the fact it was offered free for noncommercial and research purposes, a caveat that enabled everyone eager to post information without a charge to work with Gopher.

Nevertheless, Gopher never became the "killer application" that drew publishers and users onto the Net in the way that the WWW has. Unable to display anything but text, Gopher failed to offer the sort of rich publishing platform that has created so much excitement over the WWW.

2. The Rise of the WWW

Although Tim Berners-Lee began working on the World Wide Web protocol in 1989, the WWW did not attract widespread attention as a potential tool for mass-market publishing and interaction until the fall of 1993, when the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Macintosh and Windows versions of the NCSA WWW software, called Mosaic. Freely distributed over the Internet, Mosaic became immensely popular. Suddenly, casual computer users had the capability to use a simple, text-based programmed language called HyperText Mark-Up Language (HTML), and basic image presentation formats such as the CompuServe GIF, to create folders of information that could be posted on the Internet and viewed by users as multimedia pages that incorporated text and graphics.

At the same time, the Mosaic interface made it possible for the creators of a directory or page to send users to other pages posted across the Internet. By indicating that users should click on a hypertext link, as it became known, a page builder, whether a publisher or a high school kid, could suggest means to navigate throughout the WWW universe. Even more important, the simple point-and-click skills required to successfully navigate a WWW site were far more basic than the skills needed to navigate an FTP directory or a UNIX mail-reader like Pine.

Suddenly, a widely distributed technology, with its own set of protocols and standards, appeared that offered unsophisticated computer users the chance to easily use the Internet, assuming they had the right kind of computer, the right kind of Internet connection, and the right software tools. By the fall of 1994, it was estimated that upwards of 10 million people were using Mosaic and other similar WWW browsers. A year later, in fall 1995, analysts estimated that more than 15 million had access to the WWW. While those numbers may be inflated (and I think they are), they do indicate how aggressively and rapidly the WWW has seized the contemporary imagination.

3. The Web and I: A Personal Tangent

I first heard of the World Wide Web in fall 1992, when I was exploring the Internet and online services for Scholastic, prior to developing the Scholastic Network. Eager to find easy-to-use applications that allowed nontechnical people to read and discuss online, I sought out applications like AT&T's Electric Pages, an all-text electronic book, and CERN's WWW browser, an all-text application that linked together scientific directories. But both the CERN browser and the AT&T experiment were more text-driven than what I was hoping for, and I put both aside to look more closely at Caucus, a text-only conferencing system, and at American Online, an online service which at that time had only 200,000 members.

By January 1993, I was deep into the test project for what became the Scholastic Network on American Online, and was talking with Brewster Kahle, the president of WAIS, Inc. (whom I had met on the Net) about WAIS doing an Internet-based project with Scholastic.

Later that year, at a SIG-WAIS meeting in Washington, I saw a U.S. government presentation on hypertext navigation through NASA data. The presentation had been created using the latest CERN browser and X-windows machines. X-windows machines were as far away from me as the moon, yet as the demonstrator hyperlinked from one page of astronomical data and photos to another, I felt incredibly excited.

Around January 1994, Mosaic browsers for PCs became available. Deep in the midst of building a Scholastic Web site with 5,000 text files in a Gopher directory, I loaded Mosaic onto my Macintosh, dialed up my slip connection, and freaked out. "This is incredible," was my immediate response. "I am looking at text AND pictures." As an interactive publisher, I could think of nothing more exciting.

When Scholastic launched on the Internet in early 1994, we became the first non-technical publisher to have a public Web site. The Scholastic Internet Center, as we called it at the time, was accessible via Gopher, for all the teachers who had text-only, dial-up interfaces, and via the WWW. Visitors could read information about the company and its divisions, shop for products and search the catalog in our online store, and read and download curriculum materials and authors' bios from our full-text library of 5,000 articles. I remember our "official launch" of the Scholastic Internet Center at the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in Boston in spring 1994; the moment we displayed the Scholastic Web site on the screen, staffers from Dale Seymour, Houghton Mifflin, Simon and Schuster, and many other publishers were flocking around, asking us how they could do this, as teachers eagerly wrote down the gopher address and the Web uniform resource locator (URL). (When we went home that week, we discovered that 10,000 people had hit our server, beginning that day at NECC; within three months, the figure went up to 70,000 people per week and hung there until recently, when the number of visitors rose once again.)

4. An Overview of Publishing on the World Wide Web

What is the Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a graphical interface for publishing information on the Internet. It was first developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, the European physics laboratory in Switzerland.

Web Browsers

Web browsers interpret and display documents in HyperText Mark-Up Language, the international standard for WWW publishing. Netscape, Mosaic, Netcom Cruiser, MacWeb, and the AOL Web Browser are examples of common WWW browsers.

HTML as a WWW Publishing Tool

HTML is based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). HTML is a text-based language that specifies how computers should present text, graphics, sound, video, and links on a WWW page. HTML standards allow authors to publish information that can appear similar when viewed with different WWW browsers.

What HTML Supports

The current (October 1995) HTML 2.0 specification for Internet publishing on the WWW supports the following text and frame features:

single column formatting
mixture of graphics and text
frames, graphics, and images
hot text links within documents and to other Internet sites
tables, as rasterized images or as HTML 3.

What HTML Does Not Support

HTML 2.0 does not support the following page-based features:

two-column formatting
document headers and footers
page numbers
tabs and multiple spaces (supported with HTML 3.0)
underlay or overlay frames (supported with HTML 3.0)
repeating frames.

HTML documents do not contain font data. The user's Web browser, not the publisher's, determines the font styles and sizes used to display the text. Newer browsers, and extensions to Netscape, may allow publishers to control fonts more closely.

How HTML Works

HyperText Mark-Up Language is a set of tags that can be added to any regular text. By including these tags, Web browsers can read HTML pages as hypertext. HTML is written as follows:

<HTML>
<head>
<TITLE>Susan Mernit's Home Page</TITLE>
</head>
<H1>Susan Mernit's Home Page</H1>
<body>
Welcome to Susan Mernit's page.
<p>
Susan is the editor for <A HREF="http://www.nj.com">New Jersey Online,</A>, a regional daily internet service for New Jersey owned by Advance Publications. Before that, she was the Director of Internet Development for<A HREF="http://www.scholastic.com"> Scholastic, Inc.,</A>, the K-12 publishing company. Susan developed and launched the Scholastic Network on America Online in 1992 and created Scholastic's Web site, which included a digital library, a bookstore, and a complete search environment, in April 1994.<P>
</body>
</html>

When interpreted by a Web browser, such as Mosaic or Netscape, the HTML would appear on your screen something like this:

Susan Mernit's Home Page

Welcome to Susan Mernit's home page.

Susan is the editor for New Jersey Online, a regional daily internet service for New Jersey owned by Advance Publications. Before that, she was the Director of Internet Development for , the K-12 publishing company. Susan developed and launched the Scholastic Network on America Online in 1992 and created Scholastic's Web site, which included a digital library, a bookstore, and a complete search environment, in April 1994.

Bracketed tags in the HTML document above tell the computer how to display the information. Adding <H1> and </H1> around a phrase instructs the machine to print it in a larger font. The <A HREF> </A> tags tell the computer that any text between those tags should be links to other documents. The information provided immediately after the <A HREF> tag (see HTML above) specifies a URL on the Web to which the links should connect.

HTML seems intimidating at first, but it is actually formatted enough that even a very novice user can produce a basic page in a few hours, cutting and pasting other people's source code. There are an ever-increasing number of HTML editors on the market, including an extension to Word 6.0 that does not require the user to have any understanding of HTML whatsoever.

5. Technical Considerations and WWW Publishing

To publish information on the Web, a site must store large amounts of text, images, and multimedia, and must conduct complex searches in efficient, intelligent methods. Locating documents, which can be computationally intensive, and retrieving and delivering documents, which relies for speed on file retrieval hardware and software, on network bandwidth, and on communication protocols, are both high-performance computing requirements. Neither the ability of publishers to supply these capabilities nor the potential cost of these requirements has yet been measured.

In fact, if the World Wide Web does indeed become a de facto publishing standard, this may provide greater access to information for a wider variety of users, but it will also require publishers, educational institutions, and possibly individuals to acquire increasingly high-speed connections and more and more powerful technology to take advantage of the electronic publishing environment.

6. For Further Reading

On the WWW:

Links to sites explaining Internet publishing

http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/World_Wide_Web/HTML/

WWW Style Manual by the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media

http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/StyleManual_Top.HTML

Tim Berners-Lee's Style Guide

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/Overview.html

List of Guides to HTML Publishing

http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/www/html.html

Books:

: Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week, by Laura Lemay (Indianapolis: Sams Publishing, 1995).; The HTML Manual of Style, by Larry Aronson (Emeryville, CA: Ziff-Davis Press, 1994).

7. Bibliography and References

Nelson, T. 1992.: Opening hypertext: A memoir. In Literacy online: The promise (and peril) of reading and writing with computers, ed. M. C. Tuman, 43-57. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

8. An Alphabetical List of URLS for Sites Mentioned in This Paper

CNN: http://www.cnn.com
Conde Nast: http://www.condenet.com
The Discovery Channel: http://www.discovery.com
Encyclopedia Brittanica: http://www.eb.com
Hearst: http://www.mmnewstand.com
Houghton Mifflin: http://www.hmco.com
New Jersey Online: http://www.nj.com
New Jersey Online Education area: http://www.nj.com/education
New Republic Magazine
The New York Times: http://www.nyt.com
PBS: http://www.pbs.org
Random House: http://www.randomhouse.com
Scholastic
Web 66: http://web66.coled.umn.edu/
WAIS: http://www.wais.com
The White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

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Last modified September 19, 2001 (Kj).