Next: Audience Up: Spinning the Web Previous: List of Tables

Preface

My involvement with the World Wide Web started when I was asked to assess networked information discovery tools for the British Library (the national library of Great Britain), who were interested in using them for a variety of applications. I started the work in August 1993. At that time it seemed as if Gopher might turn out to be the most widely accessible system. Although the Web had been around since 1991, by May 1993 there were still only 50 or so Web sites worldwide, and most of these were at physics research institutes. So while the possibilities of the Web seemed intriguing, it appeared that its future use might be confined to a specialist scientific field. Information on the Web was accessed by a line-mode browser program with no capacity for displaying images. It was only with the advent of Mosaic, the first widely available Web browser with a graphical interface, that its potential as a wider medium started to be realized.

The Internet was beginning to open up to the wider world but its use was still largely confined to academics and researchers, who for the most part worked at dumb terminals without graphics capacity. Even where the hardware was capable of displaying images, access to the Internet was slow due to such factors as relatively narrow communications bandwidth and slow modem speeds. Widespread transmission of large graphics files would have brought networks to a standstill.

Since that time, dramatically rising modem speeds and the proliferation of Internet access provider companies have brought about a huge reduction in the cost of getting onto the Internet. The cost of hardware, including modems, continues to fall, while power and performance continue to improve. These factors have combined to attract large numbers of new network users, many of them small companies and private individuals who, as PC users, would find a complex interface to the Internet unacceptable. This situation has led to a phenomenal explosion of interest in the Web, which is now widely seen as the friendly face of the Internet.

All the information needed to access the Web both as a reader and as an information provider is out there on the Web. When you start to try to find it the volume is quite overwhelming, the variability in quality is immense, and it is distributed across so many different Web sites that it can be extremely difficult and time-consuming to make sense of it all. Several books have been written describing how to access information on the Web, but as yet there is very little on how to provide it. With this book I hope to make a contribution towards filling that void and make this information more painlessly accessible to a wider audience, in a compact and portable form.

• Audience
• The scope of this book
• Typographical conventions
• Acknowledgements

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.