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      Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web

      Part ONE

      Creating the Responsive Web

      Chapter 01

      The Mobile Web

       Before discussing responsive data design, it is important to set the stage with a brief overview of how we got here. The evolution of the mobile web does not exist in a vacuum; it is built upon the foundation of 25 years of the Internet’s growth.

      In this chapter, we’ll touch upon the beginning of the consumer Internet, and how it became commercialized. We will then move on to the shift from desktop computers to mobile devices as the primary way to access the web.

      Finally, you will gain an understanding for what the mobile web’s landscape looks like today by exploring how the screens currently used came to be, and what will become their logical successors.

      Plus, you will end up with great conversation starters for the world’s nerdiest cocktail party.

      How We Got Here

      Think about the device you have in your pocket or in your hand right now. You have an absolutely godlike amount of computing power inside a device the size, shape, and fragility of a toaster pastry. Not only can it do miraculous things like calculate your age from a picture of your belly button, but it can also talk to all of the other devices on the planet and shame you for missing your morning run.

      Back in the 1950s, though, computers were massive room-filling calculators that couldn’t say anything to one another. Computer science labs across the United States, Great Britain, and France were working on that “couldn’t say anything to one another” part, though. Throughout that decade, and into the 1960s, packet networking systems (what humans call the Internet) had been contracted by the United States Department of Defense. The first ARPANET (what would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol) link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute on October 29, 1969. The messages went as follows:

      Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 with the creation of the Computer Science Network. A year later, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) became the standard networking protocol on that network.

      So, the history of the Internet begins in the late 1950s when those big computers couldn’t talk, and it takes 19 years for the first conversation. So, naturally, let’s begin our lesson in 1980, with the history of the web.

      The web is a way of accessing information over the Internet. That is, it’s an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet, using a standard hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

      Tim Berners-Lee was an English-born contractor working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. In 1980, he became fascinated with the concept of hypertext. In the simplest terms, hypertext is text displayed in a digital form that references and provides linked access to other text. Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE, a hypertext database system to catalog people and software models. If you’ve ever used a wiki, like Wikipedia, you can grasp the core of what he was building with ENQUIRE. It was a database of hypertext information within which other related information was accessible through hyperlinks.

      By the mid-eighties, Berners-Lee had left and returned to CERN, still working on a solution to a seemingly intractable problem: Physicists around the world lacked a way to communicate data uniformly. In 1984, TCP/IP protocols were installed on a few machines at CERN, making it, at the time, the largest collection of things that make the Internet the Internet in all of Europe.

      In 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a “large hypertext database with typed links.” He began creating this database on a NeXT computer workstation, and called the project the World Wide Web.

By the end of 1990, the World Wide Web was beginning to take shape as something similar to what we know today. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) were in a working state, and the first HTTP server software and web server went online. Accompanying these were the first web pages, which described the World Wide Web project itself. Figure 1-1 shows the earliest known website. The first web browser also came online, as a project housed at CERN.

Figure 1-1: The first website, now housed at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

      A pivotal moment came on August 6, 1991. Berners-Lee posted a short summary of what was then called the “World Wide Web” project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The summary’s opening was deceptively simple, considering its significance:

      The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere.

      Tim Berners-Lee

      This summary marked the web’s introduction as a publicly available Internet service, rather than just a private project at CERN.

The Consumer Internet

      The web was first made publically popular by the Mosaic browser, which was launched by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (in a building where I once spent eleven hours as an undergrad trying to get an MS Paint drawing of a mouse to solve a maze programmatically).

      The browser was graphical (as opposed to strictly textual as in some previous browsers), and became popular due to its rapid feature growth and support of multimedia.

      After graduating from the University of Illinois, the team’s lead, Mark Andreessen, formed Mosaic Communications Corporation to develop the browser in a commercial capacity. In April 1994, the company changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was renamed Netscape Navigator.

      That same year, PC sales reached a respectable 59 million (M) units shipped.

The Rise (and Fall) of PCs

      By 1996, that number had jumped to nearly 70M units sold per year – a trend that only escalated, reaching close to 150M PCs sold in 2000. And during this period, the web continued to expand and occupy a greater part of the digital landscape.

      An entire industry grew out of the seemingly limitless potential of the web. The “dot-com bubble” refers to this period, from roughly 1997 through 2000, during which startup companies with entirely Internet-based businesses were formed and received venture capital, intending to change the world by ushering in a new renaissance – one in which we would all have golden toilets and hovercraft and a soda fountain in our kitchen…

      Oh.

So it wasn’t limitless, but the companies that could survive did; and despite a one-year slowdown, PC sales continued to grow. Along with them, new browsers entered the market and gained popularity. Microsoft launched Internet Explorer, Mac had Safari, along with open-source projects such as Firefox and Opera. More recently

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