Computer programmers like to squabble. I suppose this is true in any profession, but it is most certainly true for programmers. Don’t believe me

The History of the Web

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2021-08-02 09:00:05

Computer programmers like to squabble. I suppose this is true in any profession, but it is most certainly true for programmers. Don’t believe me? Just ask a programmer if you should set up your web services using SOAP or REST. Then grab a cup of coffee, because it’s going to be a while.

It would probably help to back up and explain what web services are. Web services are a way for machines to network with one another over the World Wide Web, and relay information in order to make changes to data. Basically, it’s a way for computers to talk to other computers. And on the web, that all started with XML.

XML was developed by eleven contributors at the W3C in 1997, inspired by the dream of a truly semantic web. The web, as it stood in 1997, allowed for publishing documents that humans could understand. This, by design, was extremely easy and forgiving. But a simple HTML web document could not be understood the same way by computers. The goal of the semantic web was to change this by adding a new layer in which computers could talk to one another, and the web itself could become a programmatically linked network of collective knowledge.

And XML was the solution. The markup language could be used to create web documents that were both machine-readable and human-readable. To make this possible, it provided an easy way to structure data with built-in types and tight, enforceable rules. In order to make the computer-readable part work, the language itself had to be far less forgiving then HTML. Errors, for instance, would mean that a page didn’t load at all. But many saw this as a strength. In any case, XML was officially published as a W3C recommendation in February of 1998.