7. BUILDING FOR FREEDOM: OPEN DATA, OPEN SOURCE 45
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Meanwhile,Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman living in France who worked at a physics lab in Switzerland, was frustrated with how difficult it was for physicists to share documents. And so, in 1989, he came up with the World Wide Web, developed the standards that made it work, and built the first web browser and web server.
The power of the browser was its flexibility (or, in law professor Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase, its “generative nature”). Just as a general-purpose computer allowed you to run any program, from a music player to a graphing calculator, the web browser let you view any kind of document. A book, a physics paper, or photos of cats with funny captions—the web browser doesn’t care; it displays whatever the server provides it with.
This seems like a trivial point now, but it was a vast change from other networked software at the time. Email programs, for example, are designed simply to display email—they have an enormously specialized interface for composing emails, finding emails, seeing who an email is from and to, and placing emails in different folders. The same was true for discussion software, chat software, and other pieces of software that communicated over the network.
The Web was different: it did not specialize in any particular type of content, but let you share whatever you like.
This lack of specialization in the Web browser allowed people to move this specialization to the Web server. The traditional Web server simply served up static documents that someone had previously written. But it was quickly clear that there was no reason the server had to be so constrained.
Instead of simply serving up previously-composed documents, the server could compose new documents “on-the-fly” as they were requested. Thus, instead of simply having a document which listed what restaurants have tables available, a web server could be instructed to query the different restaurants, learn their availability, and construct a page from the results.
And users, instead of passively requesting different prewritten documents, could submit requests to the server and actually begin to interact with it. Thus, they could ask the server to reserve one of the tables and send their name and phone number along with that request.
The result was that the humble web browser quickly began to overtake all the other “specialized” applications. Instead of having a special program just for reading
