Before talking about the technicalities of valid markup, Web 2.0, or the politics of freedom of information, it’s probably best to start off with the basics. What is the World Wide Web? After all, it is- in my humble opinion- the most important and significant invention since Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press.

Firstly, the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of millions of computer around the world, all connected to one another. Every computer that’s connected to the internet is a part of it.

The World Wide Web is not a physical thing- it’s a system of protocols which allows computers that are connected to one another (whether on the internet, or on a private intranet) to send and receive information to one another, regardless of the type of machines or what software they use.

Before the Web, if you were to connect your computer to another machine to get some information from it, you would have to know how both your computer and the one you were connecting it to worked. Thanks to the Web, not only do you not need to know how the computer you’re connecting to works- you don’t even need to know what sort of computer you’re connected to.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you’re connecting to a computer that’s a Windows PC, a Linux server, or an Apple Laptop- because of the World Wide Web, they will all use the same protocols to communicate with one another.

At least, that’s the theory… In practice, it is up to the site designer to ensure that this is the case; for example, misuse of certain elements can lead to accessibility problems- for example, using images of text instead of text for titles or links can make a site inaccessible for users who cannot see the images properly- this might include the visually impaired, users who have blocked images (perhaps to reduce the amount of data downloaded to a mobile device), or search engines.

The Web was created by Tim Berners-Lee around 1990, while working at the CERN research facility. He found that even though the facility had a huge network of hundreds of machines, it was often easier to go and talk to the owner of the machine that had the information you required than to look it up on the network, because you still needed to know how the machine functioned in order to use it over the network. Combining the ideas of hyperlinks (allowing users to jump to a different part of the text, or to a relevant section from a different text altogether), resource identifiers (the addresses of web pages) and markup languages, all of which were already in use, Berners-Lee published his proposal for the World Wide Web project in November 1990.

It’s easy to say that it was an obvious idea and didn’t actually consist of anything genuinely new. I think that the reason you can identify it as a work of genius rather than something anyone could have come up with is that for over 20 years that the internet had existed, nobody else had successfully put the idea forwards.