Key Web Features

Goals of the Web:

  • Personal empowerment
  • Social efficiency, understanding and harmony
  • Exploitation of computing power in real life

–Tim Berners-Lee, WWW6 Dev/History Keynote Speech, 11 April 1997.

The web leverages the key features of the Internet and makes them widely accessible to the public. Key features of the web in particular are its ease of use, universal accessibility, and ability to be quickly searched:

  • Ease of use. The web can be immediately used by anyone already familiar with a computer window. The only special features are links, which are as natural and intuitive to use as pressing a button. This ease of use enabled the rapid adoption of the web in the 1990’s, and led to the establishment of the Internet around the world.
  • Universal access. The open design of the web makes it easy to build web browsers for a wide range of devices. Web browsers have been deployed on cell phones and personal organizers, and the web is now the standard interface for providing access to information.
  • Search capabilities. The development of search sites greatly multiplied the power and usefulness of the web by providing the capability to effectively search the content of millions of web pages in seconds. Search sites significantly enabled the web to realize Vannevar Bush’s vision of an automated library system.