Barton
Polot
is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Music Technology at the University
of Michigan |
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 BARTON
POLOT
 he
advent of the World Wide Web fits every definition of a revolution.
Within a few brief years, the Web has grown from yet another obscure Internet
protocol into the world's most widely accepted source of information.
Few today question or doubt the efficacy of the Web. For the delivery
of digitized material in every conceivable medium and mode, the Web looms
as the cornerstone of the information age.
The World Wide Web has changed the way educators think about computers.
Across Michigan and across the nation, school districts — from the
most financially strapped to the most affluent — are allocating funds
and resources to build on-ramps to the information highway. Districts
that formerly defeated millages now routinely vote specifically in support
of technology for schools. Statistically, the odds are your school is
now wired, or will be soon.
As music educators, it behooves us all to become Web-aware — for
our students, our programs, our administrators, and our profession. Music
resources that were beyond conception a few years ago now await our collective
mouse-clicks. To take advantage of the Web, and to make our own contributions,
each of us needs to become acquainted with the World Wide Web.
he
Web is part of the Internet, a network of networks. Born in the
1950s, when the domain of computer users was confined to research institutions
and the military, the Internet was a set of hardware and software standards
for exchanging information among computer networks worldwide. A variety
of protocols, for electronic mail, file transfer, etc., determined how
information was transmitted and received, as long as the information was
unadorned text. The Web updated the Internet for the 1990s, a world of
desktop computers bearing multimedia capabilities and graphical user interfaces.
Many of the concepts of the Web can be traced to the work of Ted Nelson,
the visionary and enigmatic technologist. In the 1970s Nelson began evangelizing
his vision of a world in which information would be digital, ubiquitous,
and interconnected. In his view, information would be linked in ways more
logical than linear. For these links he coined the term "hypertext,"
and for the world of linked information, "Xanadu." Although careers, companies,
and millions of dollars were lost in the failed effort to realize Xanadu,
the concept of hypertext took on a life of its own. Computer programmers
attempted to create their own realization of hypertext, most notably Bill
Atkinson and his HyperCard software for the Macintosh.
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, claims he arrived at the concept
of hypertext independently. Nonetheless, even Nelson has endorsed his
implementation. In the early 1990s, Berners-Lee was employed as computer
consultant for the Center for Particle Physics Research (CERN) in Geneva.
Seeking to provide improved Internet services for the physicists at CERN,
he submitted a detailed proposal in 1991 that described the major components
of what we now know as the Web:
- Hypertext - the means of linking a portion of text to another
location within the document, to another document on the computer's
hard drive, or to another document anywhere on the Internet;
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) - a means of encoding text
with embedded tags, supporting formatted text, hypertext, and additional
media;
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) - the means of transmitting
and receiving HTML documents on the Internet;
- Browser - "client" software that allows users to receive and
view HTML documents on their computers.
In Berners-Lee's concept, HTML was to be platform-neutral; in fact, the
first Web browser was created for the NeXT computer. In the true spirit
of the Internet, CERN made the Web specifications public, allowing anyone
to create a browser for interpreting HTML files.
Marc Andreessen did just that. A graduate student at the University of
Illinois, Andreessen developed a Web browser called Mosaic for
Macintosh and Windows. When the university made the software available
free to the public in 1993, the unstoppable revolution had begun. More
than ten thousand copies of Mosaic were being downloaded daily
from the Illinois site.
Users became enthralled with the nascent potential of the Web, and began
creating their own Web sites. As the content of the Web grew, it attracted
more users. By any measure, the growth was explosive.
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J.W.
Pepper used to
maintain the Pepper
Music Network on a
proprietary computer
bulletin board. PMN
now has a more
elegant home on the
World Wide Web. |
|
  ne
measure of the growth of the World Wide Web is to calculate the number
of Web sites-- the number of documents a user could visit with a browser.
At the end of 1991, the first year of the Web, there were approximately
fifty Web sites. At the end of 1993, the first year of Mosaic, the
number of sites had grown to over a thousand. By the end of 1995, the Yahoo
index was registering new Web sites at the rate of 1,000 per typical
work day. Currently the rate often exceeds 2,000 per day.
Another measure of growth is to estimate the amount of content on the
Web (e.g., developers commonly add new material to old Web sites). MIT's
Nicholas Negroponte estimates the Web to be doubling in size every fifty
days.
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More difficult to measure is the number of users and the extent to which
they browse and surf. Yet, by even the most conservative estimates, the
number of users worldwide continues to grow exponentially.
Today the Web is being defined by four immutable powers. The first is
Andreessen's Netscape Corporation. It's popular browser, Netscape
Navigator, serves to define the future of the Web by virtue of
its expanding set of features. Second, in hot pursuit of Netscape is Microsoft
Corporation. Caught off-guard by the swift revolution, chairman Bill
Gates has no intention of losing his market dominance. Microsoft's Internet
Explorer rivals Navigator feature-for-feature. Third is
the American marketplace. Practically every major corporation has
established a presence on the Web, and are creating extravagant sites
intended to stand apart from their competitors. These efforts are rapidly
advancing the quality of the Web.
Fourth is the community of users, you and I. By using the Web
and contributing to it, we all help to shape this amazing revolution.
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