At the time of our interview, Internet pioneer Mike Lawrie was watching cricket on television: SA was touring the UK. He wasn't watching a local broadcast, but an Internet stream of the coverage, via a Web browser running on a PC connected to his TV. The man who brought the Internet to SA still lives and breathes connected technology.
The World Wide Web turned 21 this year, after a troubled childhood and unruly teenage years. The birth of the Web and the early stages of the Internet in SA are often described as if there was a single event that launched the service, fully formed, to the waiting users.
Not so. The history is a great deal more complicated and, in the case of the Web, far from settled. In SA, technical challenges played out against the political backdrop of Apartheid and international sanctions. Lawrie recollects sending Black Sash reports of protest action to international readers by e-mail, a practice that would have almost certainly seen the government clamp down on the embryonic South African Internet.
The Web generation
A full generation of technology users now has no memory of a time before the Web. To many users, especially of that younger generation, the Web and the Internet itself are inseparable if not outright synonymous. That is especially true in SA, where our Internet connectivity is nearly the same age as the Web.
The birth of the Web is usually pegged at 12 August 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee, working on related Internet and hypertext technologies at CERN, in Switzerland, announced the World Wide Web project in a UseNet posting. (Three months later, Lawrie would establish the first TCP/IP connections between SA and the US.)
The Web remained just one of many online services for some years, primarily offered as a text-based service, and only became popular thanks to another Internet figure, Marc Andreessen, who created the Mosaic Web browser in 1993, later to become Netscape. Mosaic was not the first graphical Web browser, but it was widely accessible, with source code available.
Although Mosaic and the Web were arguably inferior to, and certainly smaller than, many of the established networks, it was a combination that offered immediate ease of use. That was coupled with the simple way anyone could publish material to a Web server. Low friction gave the Web impetus, and its growth from that point accelerated rapidly.
The stakes are always the same - market share.
In 1995, we saw the birth of major online services, including Amazon, Yahoo and eBay, and the Web was now ready to become part of everyday life for many users. Until that point, Lawrie points out, the Web was infrequently mentioned, often in the same sentence as other networks, but not viewed as a dominant force at all.
Globally, the Web had started to pick up speed by 1995, and was widely available in SA. Even local banks moved quickly to offer services on the Web. Absa was first out of the gate in 1996, with the rest following closely behind.
With online commerce established, it would be nearly a decade before the next major wave arrived: social media. Web-based social presence dated to the 90s, with Geocities and the like, but mass-market social media really hit its stride with the MySpace and Facebook generation in the early 2000s. Suddenly, everyone was online, and the Web began to infiltrate every moment of our lives.
Now, another decade on, the next major wave is mobile, and that too is taking shape on the Web, either as Web-based applications, or simply as a common mechanism for data transfer. Web standards are now underpinning a massive global economy.
In theory, standards exist to maintain a consistently level playing field. In practice, commercial interests have attempted to exert control over standards in order to gain competitive advantage, lock users into proprietary ecosystems and thwart competition. That continues to this day, and will in the future.
The mainframe era gave way to the diaspora of client server and PC computing, but cloud computing is bringing it back.
From the start, the evolution of Web standards has been a tangled mess. The Web may have been invented in 1991, but the fundamental transport protocol, HTTP, was not published as an RFC until five years later, and then extensively revised over several years, leading to competing, inconsistent implementations. Pre-standard HTTP 1.1 was implemented in, among others, Internet Explorer 2.0 and Netscape Navigator 2.0 - the browser wars predate the finalisation of the standard itself.
Today, HTTP 1.1 is so entrenched in basic Web communication that it is nearly unthinkable to deploy a service that does not adhere to the spec. Future protocols have been proposed, but all promise backwards compatibility. Candidates include Google's proposed SPDY, a nascent HTTP 2.0 proposal, and augmentations to HTTP such as WebSockets and Microsoft S+M.
HTML, the markup language used to design Web pages, saw a similar standards battle. With only basic tags defined in early versions of the standard, the race to add functionality saw vendors adding proprietary extensions, allowing rich Web services at the expense of compatibility. At the time, it was common for Web pages to fail to work with some browsers, and the notorious 'Best viewed with...' tags on pages were becoming so common that many observers feared the Web would splinter into mutually incompatible networks.
HTML 3.2, in 1997, reconciled a lot of the browser inconsistencies. Unfortunately, the HTML standards had by then become so large and complex that few browsers could fully support the specification.
Two decades later, there are still few browsers that can boast 100% standard compliance, and the legacy of broken pages or erratic behaviour in different browsers still lingers. The latest HTML specification to be tabled, HTML5, isn't going to help - many questions remain about advanced layouts, multimedia (especially video), accelerated graphics and more. There are numerous competing platforms for chat messaging, video conferencing, authentication, Web video... you name it.
The stakes are always the same - market share. On the Web today, it's all about social market share between Facebook, Google, Twitter and others, in a bid to become the standard ways to share information. Twitter, for example, recently revamped its API terms and conditions in a clear bid to retain control over an ecosystem expanding under the influence of third-party services.
However, competing standards do eventually bed down to become permanent strata. For example, although there are many ways to stream video to a Web browser, the market is largely consolidating around a handful of options: HTML5, H.264 and WebM. Authentication standards are also appearing, with social networks working to establish themselves as the purveyors of central identities. 'Sign in with Facebook/Google/Twitter' is now a common option for many services, for example, signs of a drive towards consolidated authentication standards.
With Borg-like inevitability, the Web has come to pervade every aspect of modern life. The current generation has at most a few short years before many pre-Web legacies are gone forever. Plenty of Internet services are being absorbed by the Web too - the next generation may never use e-mail, video, chat or file servers outside of a Web browser. Even platform-specific mobile apps' brief day in the sun may be replaced by HTML5 Web apps, delivered through browsers.
Using the Web incurs high performance overheads for such services, where more efficient options already exist, which highlights how another factor permitted the Web's success: Moore's Law.
The Web was born at the dawning of an age of plenty, where the solution to a resource shortage is to throw more money at the problem until it goes away. Costs of bandwidth, computing power, memory and storage have plummeted. Today, the performance bottleneck tends to be at the server side, but the next generation of Web services brings us full circle and exemplifies the 'build big and throw money at it' model: cloud computing. The mainframe era gave way to the diaspora of client server and PC computing, but cloud computing is bringing it back.
Into the future
Outside of technology, a new battleground is emerging. Intellectual property, copyright and patents are the weapons of choice as companies fight to sustain legacy products, defend innovation and hobble competition. Amazon's one-click patent and the more recent mobile phone patent wars are indicative of the minefield of litigation the Web is becoming.
Meanwhile, the march of the mobile Web is likely to be as inexorable as the Web itself. Smartphone penetration is over 50% in developed countries, with SA catching up fast, and mobile browsing is expected to surpass desktop browsing in 2014.
In the social Web, similar developments are taking shape in social networks and interactions, in particular around brand engagement, which has the potential to finally offer a viable alternative to banner advertising, which is deeply flawed but so far has remained the lesser of the available evils. Social networks are manoeuvring to ring-fence their user bases to extract value until the pressure breaks down barriers and more open interfaces become the norm.
The embrace of the Web is now inescapable. Warts and all, the Web, and Web standards, will be the foundation for the next several generations of technology, with deep implications for business and social development.
First published in the November 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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