| Chapter 1: | The World Wide Web: A General Introduction |
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The many new features of browsers have attracted more users to the Internet. Once the Web became popular, services that made it easier to locate information on the Web sprang up. New programs called “search engines” enabled users to search for information on the Web by topic, organization, or personal name. “This went far toward solving the long-standing problem of identifying resources on the Internet, and it gave users more control over the way information on the Web would be presented to them” (Abbate, 1999, p. 217).
By 1994, Web browsers were available on almost all computer platforms, and the Web started to permeate different areas of people’s lives. The media began extensive coverage of the Internet phenomenon. For instance, in December 1993, a long story about the Web and Mosaic appeared in The New York Times (Gromov, 2002). Government agencies, such as the United Nations and the White House, went online in 1993 (Zakon, 2006). In the same year, the U.S. National Information Infrastructure Act was passed. Commercial Web sites started to appear; and so did heated discussions of the possibility of Internet commerce (Klopfenstein, 2000; Zakon, 2006. The World Wide Web Consortium was also founded in September 1994 to discuss issues pertaining to the Web and to agree on new common computer protocols (Berners-Lee, 1999).
Many would agree that the Web greatly changed the Internet. Mark Pesce (1995) commented that