Web 3.0 and the Future of Crypto

In the early 1990’s into the turn of the century, technology came a long way. The internet was conceived, and development of infrastructure ramped up, to produce content throughout the world that could be housed and transmitted over this medium. This is where the term web came about. “Web 1.0” was a “retronym” for the initial stages of the World Wide Web, or internet. This time-frame focused on creating content for the end user and utilized the first static webpages hosted on computer servers to showcase work.

The World Wide Web, in historical terms, was the “information system where documents and other web resources were identified by Uniform Resource Locators or URLs.”[1] These URLs were then linked together with hyperlinks, or links that were accessible over the internet. These links were then shortened or made easier to comprehend, hence domains replaced internet protocol or IP addresses. When a user wanted to visit a website, they no longer needed to type in an IP, for example 8.8.8.8. They typed in a domain address like google.com.

Web 1.0 saw the evolution of HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. This language was the programming code for all that one saw on the internet. If a user typed in google.com, they were taken to the google “website”, which in the “backend” or servers, housed the index.html site (the default page). To go back, a website is “a group of World Wide Web pages usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online by an individual, company, educational institution, government, or organization.”[2]

Content on the web was becoming more diverse, with GIFs or Graphics Interchange Format; most notably the dancing baby that circulated the internet in the 1990’s. A slice together of multiple pictures that allowed for a motion generated image. With 1.0, came more advanced filesystems rather than databases that managed content. Free webhosting was at the forefront, where anyone could have developed a website in the likes of GeoCities and Tripod. Online pop ups became the scourge of the internet.

Finally, emails became more personable, and relatable with the ability to embed HTML into the messages. Server-side scripting, or code that was housed on the server hosting the code, was available. This also meant the scripts or code “produced a response customized for each user's (client's) request to the website.”[3] Compared to the “client-side scripting” that ran on a web browser in a user’s computer.