월드 와이드 웹의 현재와 미래

월드 와이드 웹은 20세기의 컴퓨팅에서 가장 중요한 진보로 각광을 받아 왔다. 그러나 웹을 단일하고 정적인 발명으로 보는 견해는 초점을 놓치는 것이다. 오늘날의 웹은 과거의 웹이나 미래의 웹과는 다르다.

웹이 갖고 있는 가장 강력한 속성은 인터넷에 힘입은 것이다. 즉 즉각적이고 세계적으로 정보를 공유할 수 있는 것이다. 한때 인터넷의 약점으로 인식되었던 최종 사용자 중심의 네트워크는 웹의 강점이다. 웹은 다양한 컨텐츠를 제공하며 일부 온라인 서비스 이용자에 국한되었던 인터넷 인구를 폭발적으로 증가시켰다.

웹의 뿌리는 1960년대 후반 Douglas Engelbart와 Ted Nelson이 생각해낸 하이퍼텍스트, 즉 문서간 상호 참조 개념으로 거슬러 올라간다. 그러나 진정한 시작은 1990년 Tim Berners-Lee가 HTML 언어를 만들고, 몇 년 후 Mosaic과 같은 웹 브라우저가 출현하면서부터이다. 마우스, 그래픽 인터페이스, 인터넷 접속 서비스 확대, 저렴한 PC의 보급 등 다양한 관련 기술도 웹의 보급에 한 몫을 했다.

현재 웹은 텍스트 중심의 인터넷을 인쇄, 전화, 음악, TV, 영화 등 모든 매체를 어우르는 멀티미디어로 바꿔놓았다. 그러면 다음 세대의 웹은 어떻게 진화할 것인가?
현재의 PC 중심의 웹은 이동전화와 타블릿 컴퓨터, 기타 모바일 장비의 등장으로 인해 세계 인구의 반 이상이 사용하는 진정한 월드 와이드 웹이 될 것이다. 기술적 측면에서는 인간의 개입 없이 컴퓨터끼리 정보를 검색하고 교환할 수 있는 XML 프로토콜이
개발되는 중이다.

웹은 정보 교환을 용이하게 해 준 반면, 사생활이나 지적재산권의 침해 등 부정적 측면도 가지고 있다. 유해한 정보들이 법적, 문화적 제한을 받지 않고 확산되는 것도 문제이다.

웹이 어떻게 진화할 지는 단언할 수 없다. 미래의 웹이 실현되는 순간 그것은 이미 진화하고 있을 것이기 때문이다.

(원문)
A Fast-Changing Genie Alters the World
By JOHN MARKOFF

At the outset, it was a free and simple map to the buried treasures of the information age.

Then it morphed into something else, fueling an astounding "new economy" gold rush that at its peak last year contributed several trillion dollars in new wealth to the nation's stock markets. (Lately, things have not panned out as well for the prospectors.)

In a remarkably short period, the World Wide Web has touched or has promised to alter ? Some would say threaten ? virtually every aspect of modern life. The Web has caused giant corporations to adjust their business strategies, whether General Electric, General Motors or General Mills. And such are the abilities of the Web to "scale" ?whether up or down ?that it is also restoring craft and commerce in remote Cambodian villages. (Click on www.villageleap.com to view the current selection of woven scarves from the village of Robib in north central Cambodia. Major credit cards cheerfully accepted.)

The Web has been hailed as the most significant computing advance of the 20th century, and yet to see the Web as a single, static invention is to miss the point. Today's Web is not yesterday's, or tomorrow's.

Initially, the Web simply exploited the most powerful attribute of what was then a collection of computer networks called the Internet. That attribute, simply put, was the ability to share information globally and, when everything was working, instantaneously.

Recall that during this same period, in the early 1990's, companies like America Online and Prodigy were trying to keep computer users corralled within proprietary online services. Such services, which by that point had attracted only a few million users combined, were designed to make customers captive audiences of whatever "content" the network operators chose to provide. (It says as much about the adaptability of America Online's executives, as it does about evolving technology, that AOL has been able to turn itself into one of Web's most popular brand names.)

Compared with the old proprietary approach, the Web had a truly worldwide reach ?even if going overseas meant little more, at first, than checking the Webcam that was trained on a coffee pot in a Cambridge University computer lab.

The Web's strengths were precisely what many experts had long viewed as the Internet's weakness: the so-called "any to any" quality that treated all computers on the network as equals. Unlike the telephone network, in the words of David Eisenberg, the former Bell Labs researcher, the Internet was the ultimate "stupid" network, because all the intelligence and the power resided at the end points, not in the middle.

As with the Internet itself, the Web's roots lay in the late 1960's. Back then, Douglas Engelbart, a young engineer leading a small team of researchers at Stanford Research Institute, and Ted Nelson, a social scientist working solo, had independently come up with an idea that came to be called hypertext. With hypertext, information that allows the cross-referencing of digital documents is encoded right into the documents.

But it was not until 1990 that Tim Berners-Lee, a British programmer at the CERN physics research center in Geneva, developed hypertext markup language ?or HTML, the embedded referencing system that is encoded into each Web document. It was HTML, followed a few years later by easy-to-use Web browser software like Mosaic (and Mosaic's commercial offshoot, Netscape Navigator), that made today's Web feasible.

But feasibility also came in a confluence of related technologies that made computers usable by nontechnical people: mice pointing devices; graphical, or image-based, interfaces; widespread commercial access to the Internet; and perhaps most important, affordable personal computers with sufficient power to search for and display graphical information.

The Web turned the formerly text-based Internet into a multimedia system. And as technology continues to evolve, the Web is incorporating elements of all other media ?print publishing, telephones, music and even television and movies. (Of course, as anyone who has conducted an Internet phone conversation or downloaded a Web video can attest, the medium is not yet always as good as the message.)

Where does the Web go next?

As it moves beyond the PC onto hand-held devices, tablet computers and other so-called digital appliances, while spinning out a gossamer matrix of fiber optic cables and wireless antennas, the Web seems intent on living up to its World Wide name. Today, about half the nation's population has access to the Web via PC's. Within a few years, the Web could be accessible by half the global population, although in many cases the access will be through digital cell phones and other wireless devices.

Another watershed technology is also starting to redefine the Webscape. Until now, the Web has largely involved humans retrieving information from machines. But now comes a protocol known as XML, for Extensible Markup Language. XML organizes data so that computers can communicate directly without human intervention.

Within the next three years, XML is expected to be at the heart of the next-generation Web. And the cultural implications may be even more profound than with the first generation.

One possibility is the creation of vast automated global markets in which suppliers and manufacturers can let their computers find, buy and sell goods and services roboticly. Or genetic researchers looking for gene therapies could turn their computers loose to sift through one another's databases to identify and propose medically promising possibilities.

What are the consequences, if many routines of modern life can be conducted without human intervention?

Though the Web was initially hailed as a global digital library of Alexandria, it soon became apparent that the free flow of digital information had a darker side. The last seven years of the Web have brought new social challenges, including new threats to privacy and intellectual property law. Whether music, child pornography or hate speech, the flow of information across geographic, legal and cultural boundaries is now virtually unstoppable.

What will happen in technology's next generation, when Web machines routinely speak directly to other machines? A grand utopian transformation? Or is the world about to embark on the dark course described in Arthur C. Clarke's 1965 short story, "Dial F for Frankenstein"? The story details the first moments of a globally connected computer network, in which the network becomes a sentient being ?though one that behaves like a 2-year-old child.

In reality, the impact of the Web's next generation will probably resemble the current one, with changes taking root on the broad middle ground between human perfection and willful machine tantrums. The only certainty may be this: The world will not have time to comfortably contemplate the consequences, for the next chapter in Web's history is already hurtling forward, in Internet time.

Sources : The New York Times, December 11, 2000