Excerp from:
The World Wide Web Consortium
by Alla Zollers
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Once the World Wide Web was written, Berners-Lee had a difficult time
convincing people of the concept. In 1991 at the Hypertext conference,
his paper was only accepted for a poster session. However, by 1993 the
concept of the Web was becoming more popular as evidenced by the increase
in both the number of web servers, which in 1993 totaled about fifty, and
in the production of new text-only web browsers such as Erswise, Viola,
and Midas. At the point, websites were using both the HTTP protocol as
well as the gopher protocol, since both protocols were developed around
roughly the same time period. The gopher protocol was developed at the
University of Minnesota, ?and was originally created as an online help
system for the university?s computer department,? (Berners-Lee 1999, p.72),
thus the gopher protocol provided access to web pages through hypertext
menus presented as a file system.
Then in only a matter of months, two major events would propel the HTTP
protocol to become the worldwide standard as well a compel Tim Berners-Lee
to begin the World Wide Web Consortium. First, in the Spring of 1993, the
University of Minnesota made a dire error by deciding to reserve the right
to ask for a license fee from certain classes of users who wanted to use
gopher. ?This was an act of treason in the academic and the Internet
community,? (Berners-Lee 1999, p.73). Industry completely abandoned the
gopher protocol, and approached Berners-Lee concerned over the future of
the HTTP protocol. In order to avoid the same fate as gopher, Berners-Lee
quickly petitioned CERN to release the intellectual property rights of the
HTTP protocol into the public domain. On April 30, 1993, CERN allowed
anyone to use the Web protocol and the code free of charge, and thus the
protocol was quickly adopted as the standard for the Web. Then in early
1994, Mosaic, the first graphical browser was released, and the popularity
of the web began to increase exponentially. The Mosaic browser later became
known as Netscape Navigator.
