www's history

[Daniel Fabian]

Hi!

I'm writing a thesis about web applications and need to write abit about
their history. I did some research but was not as successful as I wish I
was. I found out that Tim Berners-Lee "invented" the www in late 1990. I was
looking for the initial proposed specification of http, but only found
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTTP2.html from 1992.

What were the differences between the 92- and the 90-version. Did the former
already specify the POST method, and was it possible to submit parameters
via GET?

I also had a look at the HTML specifications, and it seems that forms exist
since HTML2.0 from 1995 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt). Where there
any webapplications before and if yes, how did the users interact with them?

And what about CGI? Am I correct in the assumption that CGI was used to
write the first web applications? I found version 1.1 of the CGI spec at
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/, which doesn't seem to have a date
attached. Is there a version 1.0, and when was it published?

Wow, so many questions!

Thanks in advance for any answers!

Greetings,
Daniel

[Klaus Johannes Rusch]

Post by Daniel Fabian
I'm writing a thesis about web applications and need to write abit about
their history. I did some research but was not as successful as I wish I
was. I found out that Tim Berners-Lee "invented" the www in late 1990. I was
looking for the initial proposed specification of http, but only found
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTTP2.html from 1992.

HTTP/0.9 did not include response headers, see
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html
for the 1991 implementation documentation.

Post by Daniel Fabian
What were the differences between the 92- and the 90-version. Did the former
already specify the POST method, and was it possible to submit parameters
via GET?

The only method I could find in that document is GET, although others
may have been implemented.

Post by Daniel Fabian
I also had a look at the HTML specifications, and it seems that forms exist
since HTML2.0 from 1995 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt). Where there
any webapplications before and if yes, how did the users interact with them?

The <isindex> element was the first "interactive" element, mainly used
for site searches.

Post by Daniel Fabian
And what about CGI? Am I correct in the assumption that CGI was used to
write the first web applications? I found version 1.1 of the CGI spec at
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/, which doesn't seem to have a date
attached. Is there a version 1.0, and when was it published?

This document shipped with early versions of the NCSA httpd, one
archived copy is available at
http://web.archive.org/web/20020228211551/http://www.etsimo.uniovi.es/~antonio/ncsa_httpd/cgi/interface.html