Gary Monro’s blog

Tim Berners-Lee is British - a Londoner, to be precise. So am I actually. But I didn’t invent the world wide web whereas he did. There’ll be other differences between us no doubt but that’s the main one.

Anyway. I’ve learnt a few things courtesy of Wikipedia today. One thing I’ve learnt: the world wide web isn’t actually the internet; the internet is a collection of servers and connections over which the world wide web operates.

Berners-Lee created many of the web items that many of us use in our explorations around the web and which we take for granted. Hyperlinks, which allow you to click on words like this one - hyperlink - and be transported to a place of my choice is just one of them. A collection of related pieces of information, created and then bound together by an individual (or group or company) in some logical or meaningful way and navigated through using hyperlinks is called a web site. The web site’s unique address - the place from which it is summoned by the web surfer (you, for example) - is designated by its Uniform Resource Locator - or URL.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - HTTP to most of us - specifies how the browser and server send the information to each other, and Hyper Text Markup Language - good ol’ HTML - is a method of encoding the information so it can be displayed on a variety of devices.

Berners-Lee’s world wide web fixed a number of problems that existed in the vanilla internet environment. For example, unidirectional links means I can now create a link to your webpage myself without you having to do something your end to make that link work. You, in turn, can create a link to this blog without me having to do anything. So go on then.

Also, his world wide web is non-proprietary - which means you don’t need to build hardware to specific - and restrictive - operating standards.

You’d think, then, that the first ever website would have been created by this man also. And you’d be right. Click here to check out the semi-naked babes on this humdinger…

(You just had to, didn’t you…)

Actually, the first image on the web is here and isn’t the worst (nor is it the best) picture I’ve ever seen.

The world’s first web-site was viewed, naturally enough, on the world’s first web browser. The browser is a tool used to retrieve the desired information - a document of text or images, for example - from the internet server at which it is stored. Berners-Lee’s browser was a little ropey; it could only run on CERN’s (who he worked for) computers. Mosaic was the first text and graphics browser more generally available, beginning life in 1987 and becoming an ex-browser in 1997. It later morphed into Netscape’s Navigator.

So there you have it: the world wide web was created by a Brit from London. Tell your friends.

Another outstanding piece from the Daily Telegraph entitled Ten Core Values of the British Identity.

In my opinion, we can never remind ourselves often enough of what it is that we, the British, are, what we stand for and what we’ve achieved.

The leftist-liberal influence in our society - the BBC, The Guardian newspaper, the host of parasitical non-government agencies that perpetuate the ‘victim’ culture wherever it operates and, of course, the mentally and morally retarded politicians that make up a substantial part of our political class - has sucked our spirit and nurtured disgust and contempt for our own forefathers and their achievements.

They have promoted a model of society that, in assuming the inadequacy of the individual and the tyranny of the family, has ruined the lives of millions of our people as the government has taken on the roles of parent, employer, sole arbiter of right and wrong, provider of welfare, health, education and dispenser of all wisdom and knowledge.

In the meantime, our people, deliberately deprived of a set of clear and coherent standards flounder in a morass of moral and cultural relativism that leads them, in many cases, onto the path of ruination.

There are many reasons why our country is disintegrating before our eyes and I’ve only touched on a couple of them. Unlike some British conservatives, though, I feel a glimmer of hope simply because I do not believe that we, the British, are the kind of people that will allow things to continue like this for so long that we eventually sink without trace into a bubbling sea of mediocrity and decay. True, we are slow on the uptake (slow to excite, I suppose - a national characteristic) and maybe things have to get pretty bad before we’re prepared to do something about them.

But we are a proud nation and when push comes to shove I believe we’ll shove harder than our enemies.

Here’s the article itself. Please read it all.

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