Web design history [part
2]
As a parenthesis, Gopher is a system
that pre-dates the World Wide Web
for organizing and displaying files on Internet servers.
A Gopher server presents its contents
as a hierarchically structured list of files. With the
ascendance of the WWW, many gopher
databases were converted to Web sites which can be more
easily accessed via search engines.
Gopher (a three-folded origin name:
first, that it "goes-for" information; second,
that it does so through a Web of menu items analogous
to gopher holes and third, that the sports team of
the University of Minnesota is the
Golden Gopher ) was developed at the
University of Minnesota. Two systems, Veronica
and Jughead, let you search global indices
of resources stored in Gopher systems.
Gopher was released in 1991 by Paul
Lindner and Mark
McCahill.
Gopher support was disabled in Internet
Explorer in June, 2002 due to security vulnerability;
it can be re-enabled only by editing the registry. Other
browsers, including Mozilla and AOL
still support the protocol, but incompletely
- the most obvious deficiency being the inability to
render informational text included on menu pages.
Returning to the proposal Tim presented,
there were three new technologies incorporated into
that proposal. Briefly, they were HTML
( HyperText Markup Language ) used
to write the Web documents, HTTP (
HyperText Transfer Protocol ) to transmit
the pages and a Web browser client software program
to receive and interpret data and display results. An
important concept of his proposal included the fact
that the client software program's user interface would
be consistent across all types of computer platforms
so that users could access information from many types
of computers.
The first user interface for such a program (named
at CERN, the World Wide Web
or WWW ) was completed in
late 1989. The program was used on a small network in
March 1991 . By May
1991 the system using HTML, HTTP and a client
software program (browser) was fully operational
on the multi platform computer network at the CERN
laboratories in Switzerland.
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