1. The web as a universal space
In the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web and currently director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),1 the internet's most important facet is its universality. Berners-Lee (2004): “The Internet connects all devices without regard to the type or size or band of device, nor with regard to the wireless or wired or optical infrastructure used. This is its great strength.” Internet content should thus be independent from the devices that access and render it.2 If not, the internet is splintered into chunks of information that can only be viewed with particular devices.
This idea of device independence relates directly to the web's “reference” aspect—online resources are tied to Uniform Resource Identifiers or URIs,3 which we use for accessing and pointing to them. In an ideal situation, URIs should be completely portable between browsers and devices. Berners-Lee again (ibid.): “The URI is passed around, written, spoken, buried in links, bookmarked, traded while Instant Messaging and through email. People look up URIs in all sorts of conditions. [...] It is fundamentally useful to be able to quote the URI for some information and then look up that URI in an entirely different context.”
Unfortunately enough, the reality is often very different; in a lot of situations, access to certain types of content is tied to specific browsing environments, thereby compromising referencing practices and disallowing universal access.
The next section gives an overview of what happened with the internet's universality principle in the first, rather turbulent decade of its existence.
1 The W3C describes itself as “an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.” More info at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/.
2 See also the W3C's Device Independence Activity project: http://www.w3.org/2001/di/.
3 An URI is a string of characters pointing to an abstract or physical resource. Probably better known is the term URL or Uniform Resource Locator, which is a subset of the URI protocol.