The World Wide Web's 30th anniversary celebrated in today's Google Doodle

If it weren’t for the World Wide Web, would I be writing this article, to share with the world to read? How would I even share it?

Today, on 12 March 2019, Google is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the day the World Wide Web was born.

Three decades ago, when the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee , was 33-year-old himself, submitted a proposal titled “Information Management: A Proposal”. The proposal envisioned “a large hypertext database with typed links,” named “Mesh,” that could help the employees at CERN (a large nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland) share information amongst multiple computers.

This was when Berners-Lee’s boss found the idea “vague, but exciting” and allowed him time to develop the working model of the World Wide Web. He used the HTML language, the HTTP application, and WorldWideWeb.app — the first Web browser and page editor.

As Google correctly highlights on the blog , the World Wide Web is not to be “confused with the internet, which had been evolving since the 1960s, the World Wide Web is an online application built upon innovations like HTML language, URL ‘addresses’, and hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP.”

By 1991, the external Web servers were up and running, which soon revolutionised life as we know it. As of 12 March 2019, there are nearly 2 billion websites online. Whether you use these sites for email, social networking, gaming, or binging on videos of cute puppies, the World Wide Web’s a part of your daily life.

March 12, 1989 —

The World Wide Web begins as a @CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

When @timberners_lee first proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, his boss responded: "vague but exciting" pic.twitter.com/cDt1BfFAWl

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) March 12, 2019

However, while 30 years down the lane, the Web has changed the lives of billions in many ways, this ‘mesh’ has also evolved in various aspects, some of which have displeased its inventor on many occasions.

In a letter published on Monday, that marked the web’s 30th anniversary, Berners-Lee said he understands concerns that the internet is no longer a “force for good.” “The fight for the web is one of the most important causes of our time,” he wrote. He believes that the Web has become ‘dysfunctional’ with ‘perverse’ incentives.