Self-sovereign identity ( SSI ) is an approach to digital identity that gives individuals control over the information they use to prove who they are to websites , services, and applications across the web. Without SSI, individuals with persistent accounts (identities) across the internet must rely on a number of large identity providers, such as Facebook (Facebook Connect) and Google (Google Sign-In), that have control of the information associated with their identity. If a user chooses not to use a large identity provider, then they have to create new accounts with each service provider, which fragments their web experiences. Self-sovereign identity offers a way to avoid these two undesirable alternatives. In a self-sovereign identity system, the user accesses services in a streamlined and secure manner, while maintaining control over the information associated with their identity.
83-597: Web3 (also known as Web 3.0 ) is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web which incorporates concepts such as decentralization , blockchain technologies , and token-based economics. This is distinct from Tim Berners-Lee 's concept of the Semantic Web . Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2.0 , wherein they say data and content are centralized in a small group of companies sometimes referred to as " Big Tech ". The term "Web3"
166-583: A > . Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase , which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990. The hyperlink structure of the web is described by the webgraph : the nodes of the web graph correspond to
249-615: A buzzword or marketing term. Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 refer to eras in the history of the World Wide Web as it evolved through various technologies and formats. Web 1.0 refers roughly to the period from 1989 to 2004, where most sites consisted of static pages , and the vast majority of users were consumers, not producers of content. Web 2.0 is based around the idea of "the web as platform" and centers on user-created content uploaded to forums , social media and networking services, blogs , and wikis , among other services. Web 2.0
332-520: A home page containing a directory of the site web content . Some websites require user registration or subscription to access content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards , web-based email , social networking websites, websites providing real-time price quotations for different types of markets, as well as sites providing various other services. End users can access websites on
415-494: A web application . Consequently, a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how
498-524: A web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing' (after channel surfing ), or 'navigating
581-457: A "decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain." In 2021, the idea of Web3 gained popularity. Particular interest spiked toward the end of 2021, largely due to interest from cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investments from high-profile technologists and companies. Executives from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz traveled to Washington, DC , in October 2021 to lobby for the idea as
664-546: A browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format. The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet on 23 August 1991. The Web
747-503: A combination of decentralized or federated platforms, secured interoperability , and verifiable computing through distributed ledger technologies. Some visions are based around the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Decentralized finance (DeFi) is another key concept; in it, users exchange currency without bank or government involvement. Self-sovereign identity allows users to identify themselves without relying on an authentication system such as OAuth , in which
830-420: A decentralized web, which they reported might make it more difficult to prevent cybercrime , online harassment , hate speech , and the dissemination of child pornography . But, the news website also states that, "[decentralized web] represents the cyber-libertarian views and hopes of the past that the internet can empower ordinary people by breaking down existing power structures". Some other critics of Web3 see
913-637: A false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony." Kevin Werbach , author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust , has said that "many so-called 'Web 3.0' solutions are not as decentralized as they seem, while others have yet to show they are scalable, secure and accessible enough for the mass market", adding that this "may change, but it's not a given that all these limitations will be overcome". In early 2022, Moxie Marlinspike , creator of Signal , articulated how Web3
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#1732772308855996-625: A frenzy for the Web and started the dot-com bubble . Microsoft responded by developing its own browser, Internet Explorer , starting the browser wars . By bundling it with Windows, it became the dominant browser for 14 years. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which created XML in 1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter XHTML . In the meantime, developers began exploiting an IE feature called XMLHttpRequest to make Ajax applications and launched
1079-490: A network, a web browser can retrieve a web page from a remote web server . The web server may restrict access to a private network such as a corporate intranet. The web browser uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make such requests to the web server . A static web page is delivered exactly as stored, as web content in the web server's file system . In contrast, a dynamic web page
1162-627: A particular topic or purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and education. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically a part of an intranet . Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents , typically composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML , XHTML ). They may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors . Web pages are accessed and transported with
1245-446: A potential solution to questions about regulation of the web, with which policymakers have been grappling. Specific visions for Web3 differ, and the term has been described by Olga Kharif as "hazy", but they revolve around the idea of decentralization and often incorporate blockchain technologies, such as various cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Kharif has described Web3 as an idea that "would build financial assets, in
1328-472: A public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet , or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site. Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can be a personal website , a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organization website, etc. Websites are typically dedicated to
1411-422: A range of devices, including desktop and laptop computers , tablet computers , smartphones and smart TVs . A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser ) is a software user agent for accessing information on the World Wide Web. To connect to a website's server and display its pages, a user needs to have a web browser program. This is the program that the user runs to download, format, and display
1494-427: A screenshot suggesting Discord might be exploring integrating cryptocurrency wallets into their platform. Two days later, and after heavy user backlash, Discord announced they had no plans to integrate such technologies and that it was an internal-only concept that had been developed in a company-wide hackathon . Some legal scholars quoted by The Conversation have expressed concerns over the difficulty of regulating
1577-594: A substantial level of trust. The eIDAS SSI legal report also describes several scenarios of how SSI can fulfill the necessary regulatory conditions. Furthermore, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) forms the legal basis for the handling of personal data. The EBSI GDPR Legal Report provides more information on this. SSI is a value laden technology whose technical operationalizations differ (see Technical aspects). Therefore, its implementations can vary significantly and embed into
1660-439: A translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when web applications sought to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable. As the mobile Web grew in popularity, services like Gmail .com, Outlook.com , Myspace .com, Facebook .com and Twitter .com are most often mentioned without adding "www." (or, indeed, ".com") to
1743-524: A trusted party has to be reached in order to assess identity. Academic researchers, such as Tomer J. Chaffer and Justin Goldston in 2022, have described Web3 as a possible solution to concerns about the over-centralization of the web in a few " Big Tech " companies. Some have expressed the notion that Web3 could improve data security , scalability , and privacy beyond what is currently possible with Web 2.0 platforms. Bloomberg states that skeptics say
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#17327723088551826-429: A web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering "microsoft" may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and "openoffice" to http://www.openoffice.org . This feature started appearing in early versions of Firefox , when it still had
1909-429: A web page on the user's computer. In addition to allowing users to find, display, and move between web pages, a web browser will usually have features like keeping bookmarks, recording history, managing cookies (see below), and home pages and may have facilities for recording passwords for logging into web sites. The most popular browsers are Chrome , Firefox , Safari , Internet Explorer , and Edge . A Web server
1992-507: A year. Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server . Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape the following year and released the Navigator browser , which introduced Java and JavaScript to the Web. It quickly became the dominant browser. Netscape became a public company in 1995 which triggered
2075-419: Is server software , or hardware dedicated to running said software, that can satisfy World Wide Web client requests. A web server can, in general, contain one or more websites. A web server processes incoming network requests over HTTP and several other related protocols. Self-sovereign identity The TCP/IP protocol provides identifiers for machines, but not for the people and organisations operating
2158-442: Is "a myth, a fairy story. It's what parents tell their kids about at night if they want them to grow up to become economists". In 2021, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk expressed skepticism about Web3 in a tweet, saying that Web3 "seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now." In November 2021, James Grimmelmann of Cornell University referred to Web3 as vaporware , calling it "a promised future internet that fixes all
2241-441: Is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with
2324-509: Is disagreement about how secure and decentralized this is in practice. Others have expressed beliefs that Web3 and the associated technologies are a pyramid scheme . Jack Dorsey , co-founder and former CEO of Twitter , dismissed Web3 as a "venture capitalists' plaything". Dorsey opined that Web3 will not democratize the internet, but it will shift power from players like Facebook to venture capital funds like Andreessen Horowitz . Liam Proven, writing for The Register , concludes that Web3
2407-603: Is generally considered to have begun around 2004 and continues to the current day. Web3 is distinct from Tim Berners-Lee 's 1999 concept of a Semantic Web , which was also sometimes referred to as Web 3.0. While the Semantic Web envisioned a web of linked data, Web3 in the blockchain context refers to a decentralized internet built upon distributed ledger technologies. The term "Web3" was coined by Polkadot founder and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in 2014, referring to
2490-514: Is generally recognized that for an identity system to be self-sovereign, users control the verifiable credentials that they hold, and their consent is required to use those credentials. This reduces the unintended sharing of users' personal data . This is contrasted with the centralized identity paradigm where identity is provided by some outside entity. In an SSI system, holders generate and control unique identifiers called decentralized identifiers . Most SSI systems are decentralized , where
2573-403: Is generated by a web application , usually driven by server-side software . Dynamic web pages are used when each user may require completely different information, for example, bank websites, web email etc. A static web page (sometimes called a flat page/stationary page ) is a web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by
Web3 - Misplaced Pages Continue
2656-449: Is not as decentralized as it appears to be, mainly due to consolidation in the cryptocurrency field, including in blockchain application programming interfaces which are currently mainly controlled by the companies Alchemy and Infura ; cryptocurrency exchanges which are mainly dominated by Binance , Coinbase , MetaMask , and OpenSea ; and the stablecoin market which is currently dominated by Tether . Marlinspike also remarked that
2739-450: Is not required by any technical or policy standard and many websites do not use it; the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch . According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of www as subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page; however
2822-464: Is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens. Nonetheless, it is often called simply the Web , and also often the web ; see Capitalization of Internet for details. In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng ( 万维网 ), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net",
2905-533: Is the best known of such efforts. Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide. The hostname of a web server is often www , in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server , and news or nntp for a Usenet news server . These hostnames appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com . The use of www
2988-407: Is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application software . The information in the Web is transferred across the Internet using HTTP. Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website . A single web server may provide multiple websites, while some websites, especially
3071-435: Is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications . With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript , it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web. Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for
3154-431: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption ( HTTP Secure , HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user. The user's application, often a web browser , renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal . Hyperlinking between web pages conveys to the reader the site structure and guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with
3237-764: The Web 2.0 revolution. Mozilla , Opera , and Apple rejected XHTML and created the WHATWG which developed HTML5 . In 2009, the W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML. In 2019, it ceded control of the HTML specification to the WHATWG. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet . Tim Berners-Lee states that World Wide Web
3320-581: The web browsing history forward of the displayed page. Using Ajax technologies the end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The Ajax engine sits only on the browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server. Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to create web pages that are not static web pages , though it has fallen out of common use since
3403-473: The DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending www to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such as www2 , secure or en for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to
Web3 - Misplaced Pages Continue
3486-661: The German and European legal area, there are two regulations that are of particular importance for the topic. These include the eIDAS Regulation, which forms the most important framework for trust in electronic identification in the EU and is a fundamental building block of the digital single market. The European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI) has provided the SSI eIDAS Bridge, as a technical implementation that enables
3569-455: The HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997. Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this: < a href = "http://example.org/home.html" > Example.org Homepage </
3652-423: The HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing. HTTP normally uses port number 80 and for HTTPS it normally uses port number 443 . The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text: The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfil
3735-869: The International Association for Trusted Blockchain Application (INATBA), the EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum and the European SSI Framework. In 2019, the EU created an eIDAS compatible European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF). The ESSIF makes use of decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). The Korean government created a public/private consortium specifically for decentralized identity. In
3818-449: The Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers . Servers and resources on
3901-411: The Internet. The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN . He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as distributing them to collaborators outside CERN. In his design, Berners-Lee dismissed the common tree structure approach, used for instance in
3984-512: The URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behaviour, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types . As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
4067-451: The Web'. Early studies of this new behaviour investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation. The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL http://example.org/home.html . The browser resolves
4150-675: The World Wide Web and web browsers . A web browser displays a web page on a monitor or mobile device . The term web page usually refers to what is visible, but may also refer to the contents of the computer file itself, which is usually a text file containing hypertext written in HTML or a comparable markup language . Typical web pages provide hypertext for browsing to other web pages via hyperlinks , often referred to as links . Web browsers will frequently have to access multiple web resource elements, such as reading style sheets , scripts , and images, while presenting each web page. On
4233-623: The World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text , images , embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation , or web surfing,
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#17327723088554316-465: The advent of blockchain technology, a new model for decentralized identity emerged in 2015. The FIDO Alliance proposed an identity model that was no longer account-based, but identified people through direct, private, peer-to-peer connections secured by public/private key cryptography . Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) summarises all components of the decentralized identity model: digital wallets, digital credentials, and digital connections. SSI addresses
4399-543: The appearance of the document. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links , quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags , written using angle brackets . Tags such as < img /> and < input /> directly introduce content into
4482-452: The assembly of every new web page proceeds, including the setting up of more client-side processing. A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser. JavaScript programs can interact with the document via Document Object Model , or DOM, to query page state and alter it. The same client-side techniques can then dynamically update or change the DOM in
4565-422: The concept as a part of a cryptocurrency bubble , or as an extension of blockchain -based trends that they see as overhyped or harmful, particularly NFTs . Some critics have raised concerns about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Cryptocurrencies vary in efficiency, with proof of stake having been designed to be less energy intensive than the more widely used proof of work , although there
4648-421: The credentials are managed using crypto wallets and verified using public-key cryptography anchored on a distributed ledger . The credentials may contain data from an issuer's database, a social media account , a history of transactions on an e-commerce site, or attestation from friends or colleagues. The European Union is exploring decentralized digital identity through a number of initiatives including
4731-446: The difficulty of establishing trust in an interaction. In order to be trusted, one party in an interaction will present credentials to the other parties, and those relying on the parties can verify that the credentials came from an issuer that they trust. In this way, the verifier's trust in the issuer is transferred to the credential holder. This basic structure of SSI with three participants is sometimes called "the trust triangle". It
4814-669: The domain. In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u . Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub , particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry , in his "Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh . The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used without much distinction. However,
4897-564: The existing CERNDOC documentation system and in the Unix filesystem , as well as approaches that relied in tagging files with keywords , as in the VAX/NOTES system. Instead he adopted concepts he had put into practice with his private ENQUIRE system (1980) built at CERN. When he became aware of Ted Nelson 's hypertext model (1965), in which documents can be linked in unconstrained ways through hyperlinks associated with "hot spots" embedded in
4980-584: The form of tokens, into the inner workings of almost anything you do online". A policy brief published by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge defined Web3 as "the putative next generation of the web's technical, legal, and payments infrastructure—including blockchain, smart contracts and cryptocurrencies." According to Liu, Zhuotao, et al. (2021), three fundamental architectural enablers of Web3 were identified as
5063-419: The idea "is a long way from proving its use beyond niche applications, many of them tools aimed at crypto traders". The New York Times reported that several investors are betting $ 27 billion that Web3 "is the future of the internet". Some Web 2.0 companies, including Reddit and Discord , have explored incorporating Web3 technologies into their platforms. On November 8, 2021, CEO Jason Citron tweeted
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#17327723088555146-420: The machines. This makes the network-level identifiers on the internet hard to trust and rely on for information and communication for a number of reasons: 1) hackers can easily change a computer’s hardware or IP address, 2) services provide identifiers for the user, not the network. The absence of reliable identifiers is one of the primary sources of cybercrime, fraud, and threats to privacy on the internet. With
5229-485: The metaverse did not really welcome everyone, because owners of NFT virtual real estate on sites such as Decentraland could keep people out who did not have the assets. World Wide Web The World Wide Web ( WWW or simply the Web ) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over
5312-433: The most popular ones, may be provided by multiple servers. Website content is provided by a myriad of companies, organizations, government agencies, and individual users ; and comprises an enormous amount of educational, entertainment, commercial, and government information. The Web has become the world's dominant information systems platform . It is the primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact with
5395-510: The new system to documents organized in other ways (such as traditional computer file systems or the Usenet ). Finally, he insisted that the system should be decentralized, without any central control or coordination over the creation of links. Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN in May 1989, without giving the system a name. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including
5478-663: The new web resembles the old web. An Ad Age article from 2022 stated "early adopters want to make a new internet that alleviates the problems of the old one" but said if companies put the same type of people in charge as on the earlier version, and those people had similar attitudes, the same problems would happen. Another article in the same issue of the magazine quoted Alex Smeele, co-founder of Non-Fungible Labs, who said companies that wanted to participate in Web3 were "actually going to have to rethink their entire business model." Ana Constantino, founder of meetup platform Nowhere, said
5561-427: The page while data is retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the server to check whether new information is available. A website is a collection of related web resources including web pages , multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name , and published on at least one web server . Notable examples are wikipedia .org, google .com, and amazon.com . A website may be accessible via
5644-485: The page. Other tags such as < p > surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page. HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript , which affects the behaviour and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both
5727-511: The perception generated by the term, leading to semantic confusion. Critics argue that SSI may exacerbate social inequalities and exclude those with limited access to technology or digital literacy. SSI assumes reliable internet connectivity, access to compatible devices, and proficiency in navigating digital systems. Consequently, marginalized populations, including the elderly, individuals in developing regions, or those with limited technological resources, may face exclusion and reduced access to
5810-542: The popularization of AJAX , a term which is now itself rarely used. Client-side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic web experience in a browser. JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich , then of Netscape , for use within web pages. The standardised version is ECMAScript . To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). Client-side script
5893-458: The request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically prepend http:// to user-entered URIs, if omitted. A web page (also written as webpage ) is a document that is suitable for
5976-431: The request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success: followed by the content of the requested page. Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML ) for a basic web page might look like this: The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup ( < title > , < p > for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words to format the text on the screen. Many web pages use HTML to reference
6059-421: The same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently , only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root. When a user submits an incomplete domain name to
6142-420: The same way. A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page update using Ajax technologies will neither create a page to go back to nor truncate
6225-415: The server name of the URL ( example.org ) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as 203.0.113.4 or 2001:db8:2e::7334 . The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well known for
6308-625: The text, it helped to confirm the validity of his concept. The model was later popularized by Apple 's HyperCard system. Unlike Hypercard, Berners-Lee's new system from the outset was meant to support links between multiple databases on independent computers, and to allow simultaneous access by many users from any computer on the Internet. He also specified that the system should eventually handle other media besides text, such as graphics, speech, and video. Links could refer to mutable data files, or even fire up programs on their server computer. He also conceived "gateways" that would allow access through
6391-440: The things people don't like about the current internet, even when it's contradictory." Grimmelmann also argued that moving the internet toward a blockchain-focused infrastructure would centralize and cause more data collection compared to the current internet. Software engineer Stephen Diehl described Web3 in a blog post as a "vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public's negative associations of crypto assets into
6474-441: The two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of computer networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking . In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources , linked by hyperlinks and URIs . Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS , which are application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet transport protocols. Viewing
6557-424: The very technology different goals, agenda, and intentions. The term "self-sovereign identity" can create expectations that individuals have absolute control and ownership over their digital identities, akin to physical possessions. However, in practice, SSI involves complex technical infrastructure, interactions with identity issuers and verifiers, and compliance with legal frameworks. The reality may not align with
6640-465: The web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead" links . The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive websites. The Internet Archive , active since 1996,
6723-417: The working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx . It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices. The scheme specifiers http:// and https:// at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure , respectively. They specify the communication protocol to use for
6806-507: Was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created . CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use. After the NCSA released the Mosaic web browser later that year, the Web's popularity grew rapidly as thousands of websites sprang up in less than
6889-501: Was coined in 2014 by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood , and the idea gained interest in 2021 from cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies, and venture capital firms. The concepts of Web3 were first represented in 2013. Critics have expressed concerns over the centralization of wealth to a small group of investors and individuals, or a loss of privacy due to more expansive data collection. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have argued that Web3 only serves as
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