The Internet is currently the most influential development in digital language technology. This lecture introduces the Internet and of its main application,

The Internet is currently the most influential development in digital language technology.

This lecture introduces the Internet and of its main application, the World Wide Web, and then goes on to hypertext and HTML, the language representation technology of the Web.

1.The Internet

The Internet is hardware --a huge worldwide collection of physically interconnected computers.

To understand how it came into being and why it looks as it does, some history is required.

In the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War between the Soviet Empire and the West, America created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to compete against the Soviets in science and technology.

One of its briefs was to develop a reliable communications network for computers, with the aim of creating a decentralized network of military computers which could survive wartime damage.

Work on this network began in 1962, and it began operation in 1969. It was known as ARPANET.

1. The Internet

1972: first email program was run on ARPANET

1973 ARPANET was extended to Europe; by mid-1990s, the network was worldwide.

By the late 1970s ARPANET was being extensively used by academics .

1990 NSFNET replaced ARPANET.

1991 creation of the World Wide Web and the first Web Browser; traffic over the network, already large, now began a period of explosive growth.

1995 NSFNET reverted to research use; Internet infrastructure was increasingly provided by the private sector (Compuserve, America Online etc), which is where we are now.

2. The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, or 'Web' for short, is software that runs on the Internet. Again, some history is useful for understanding it.

In 1989 CERN (Centre European pour la Recherche Nucleaire) was the largest Internet-using site in Europe.

One of the scientists there, Tim Berners-Lee, in 1989 proposed a hypertext-based computer system to provide "a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help", which he called the World Wide Web.

2. The World Wide Web

Such a system was implemented in 1990/91 using what remain standard mechanisms on the WWW today: 

•The protocol used for communication between computers, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

•The language used in composing web documents, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

•The website and document addressing mechanism, the Universal Resource Locator (URL).

2. The World Wide Web

In 1993 Marc Andreesen and his team at the University of Illinois introduced the first Web browser, called Mosaic, and made it available free of charge on the Internet.

Mosaic had a point-and-click user interface of the sort familiar to Windows and Macintosh users, which helped it gain immediate popularity, and as a result worldwide use of the Web increased dramatically.

Soon thereafter, Andreesen was involved in the development of Netscape, which was widely used for Web browsing alongside Microsoft's Internet Explorer and now lives on in Firefox.

Creation of the World Wide Web and the release of the Mosaic and later browsers are the two most significant contributing factors to the success and popularity of the Web today.

3. Hypertext

3.1 The nature of hypertext

Hypertext can best be understood relative to conventional text.

A conventional text document is strictly sequential, that is, it is meant to be read from beginning to end.

There are, however, occasions when one needs to take a sideways step out of the sequence and look something up.

This could be as simple as coming to an unknown word, getting a dictionary off the shelf, looking it up, and then resuming one's reading.

3. Hypertext

3.1 The nature of hypertext

In other cases, particularly in nonfiction books, it could mean going to some other information source to elucidate an unfamiliar concept.

If the book in question is about computers and mentions SCSI without explanation, for example, one would have to get another book off the shelf or access the Web and look the acronym up before continuing to read.

And, in academic books, the author provides markers in the text itself which refer to footnotes and works by other others that can and should be referenced for further information.

3. Hypertext3.1 The nature of hypertext Hypertext is a generalization of this nonsequentiality made possible by electronic language representation technology.

A hypertext document is the same as a conventional text document in the sense there is sequential continuity: it is meant to be read from beginning to end.

It differs from the conventional document, however, in that, at selected places in the text, there are links to other sources of information which the author judges to be relevant at those points in the document.

This is similar to footnotes in conventional academic texts, but differs from these in two important ways:

3. Hypertext3.1 The nature of hypertext 

-- With footnotes in conventional text, it is necessary to stop reading, get up, go to the bookshelf, library, or bookstore, look up the reference, and then continue reading --an elaborate procedure.

With hypertext, however, the link is to a source of information that, like the text itself, is in electronic form, and is retrieved by the computer more or less instantaneously, which is very much quicker and more convenient.

3. Hypertext3.1 The nature of hypertext 

-- Footnotes in a conventional text refer to other books or parts or books.

A hypertext document, similarly, refer to other (electronic) texts, but is not limited to text alone: any information that can be electronically stored on a computer, such as graphics or audio, can be referenced.

3. Hypertext3.1 The nature of hypertext Hypertext is, therefore, a substantial improvement over conventional text in terms of speed, convenience, and range of nonsequential reference to information that supplements the sequential base text.

The real power of hypertext comes, however, from the realization that hypertext documents can be interlinked.

Given a collection of hypertext documents, any one of them can link to any of the others in any pattern that its author deems appropriate.

There is, moreover, no limit in principle on how many hypertext documents there can be --a collection can run into the hundreds of millions or even billions.

3. Hypertext3.1 The nature of hypertext 

A large or very large collection of interlinked hypertext documents is, therefore, a knowledge structure: a web of quickly and conveniently accessible and almost infinitely expandable knowledge.

Or, put another way, it puts at the fingertips of the individual computer user an access to virtually instantaneous knowledge on a scale previously available only from physical libraries with considerable expenditure of time and effort.

The prime example of such a collection of hypertext documents in the world today is the World Wide Web

3. Hypertext

3.2 History of Hypertext

The idea of hypertext was introduced by Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1945, and the term 'hypertext' was first used by Ted Nelson in 1965 to mean 'nonsequential writing - text that branches and allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen'.

Several hypertext systems were developed in the later 1960s and the 1970s.

Janet Walker's 1985 Symbolics Document Examiner was the first hypertext-based system to gain widespread acceptance and usage, and in 1987 Apple Computers bundled HyperCard free with all Macintosh machines.

3. Hypertext

3.2 History of Hypertext

HyperCard quickly became the most widely used hypertext system, and many HyperCard-based applications were developed.

Then, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee made hypertext the basis for document composition in his World Wide Web, and the rest, as they say, is history.

4. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) HTML is a system for composing hypertext documents specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. 

An HTML document is essentially a text document into which markers called tags have been inserted.

A tag is an instruction to do something: when a Web browser like Internet Explorer sees such a tag, it follows the instruction which the tag contains.

These instructions are of two main sorts:

•Formatting --how the text is to look on the screen: background colour, types of font, how many columns, and so on

•Hyperlink --at this point in the text, link to some other HTML document or to a graphic (ie, a picture or a logo)

4. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Consider, for example, a plain text document:

4. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) An HTML version using a basic range of tags might look like this:

4. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) When viewed with a Web browser, the above HTML text looks like this:

4. HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

HTML and its various extensions provide a large number of additional tags, and these are used to create the highly developed websites to which we have become accustomed.

Even a simple page like the present one contains a large variety of such tags, as a switch to the page source shows.

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

In assessing the implications of electronic text for cultural complexity, the preceding lecture pointed out its two main benefits:

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

i. Dissemination of knowledge and human freedom

It is a truism that knowledge is power, and control of access to knowledge is therefore control of access to power.

A major factor in the development of human culture has been the progressive liberation of access to knowledge by an ever-greater proportion of humanity as language technology has developed.

Electronic text has made knowledge available worldwide, particularly via internet-based applications, and this has resulted in much greater oversight of the conduct of ruling political and economic elites, and recently challenges to and even termination of their authority by the will of the people.

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

ii. Flowering of science and technology

As access to knowledge has increased with the development of language technology, humanity's understanding of nature of its place in the natural order has grown, and technology based on this knowledge has greatly augmented the quality of human lives.

Access to scientific knowledge via electronic text and the internet has accelerated the growth of science and technology in the developed world and has made it readily accessible, sometimes for the first time, in the developing world.

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

By providing worldwide connectivity, the internet is the medium by which these benefits have been realized via applications like electronic communications and the Web.

The utopian ideals with which these internet-based applications were greeted in the 1990s have, however, increasingly had to give way to a more ambivalent view of the internet and its worldwide consequences in the light of experience.

A few of the more obvious motivations for ambivalence are:

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

The internet has enabled globalization of the world economy, that is, movement of capital investment to countries where labour is cheapest. This has had and is having fundamental social consequences: exploitation in poor countries where labour is cheap, unemployment where labour is expensive, and decimation of manufacturing in developed economies as goods produced by cheap labour flood world markets.

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

The internet has enabled globalization of world financial markets, with the imbalances in or abuses of those markets are no longer confined to national economies but have worldwide effects, as recent events have shown.

In addition, this globalization has generated a new form of warfare, cyber-war, whereby countries try to compromise their competitors' financial systems by deliberate destabilization.

5. The sociology and politics of the Web

The distributed nature of the internet makes it difficult to control, but this has not prevented governments from attempting it, and indications are that they are succeeding. Some examples:

- The Clipper chip

- The UK identity card

- UK data retention law

For more examples of government policies which potentially threaten civil liberties see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_liberties_in_the_United_Kingdom