Happy Birthday www

According to an article in Nature News yesterday, 6 August was the 20th anniversary of when the first website went live in 1991.  It was at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, on the France-Switzerland border near Geneva, better known as CERN [Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire].  Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues took the idea of ‘hypertext’ – a word coined by Ted Nelson – and turned it in to HTML [hypertext mark-up language], the computer language behind this and other websites [see ‘View/Source’ in the Internet Explorer browser, or equivalent in others].  The original purpose was as “an information management system which would allow people at different sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a project.”  Over 20 years, “a project” has become “just about anything”, both good and bad.  In some of the world’s cultures, a 21st birthday is marked as a milestone indicating ‘maturity’.  In a year’s time, I doubt if the World Wide Web will show any signs of physical growth diminishing to zero, or ‘growing up and settling down’ in a sense of social responsibility.  But who would want to be without it now?
Source:http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/happy_birthday_www.html?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20110809