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Once upon a time, web pages were just text, written in something called “Hypertext Mark-Up Language” or HTML. This is a code that makes much use of angle brackets, quotation marks and forward slashes. When your computer requested a web page from a site, the site sent back the text file then your web browser program parsed the angle brackets and the other gobbledegook in order to render it for displaying on your screen.
That was the state of the technology in 1993. In 1994, Brendan Eich, a programmer working for Netscape, the first browser company, had the idea of embedding in a web page mini-programs (called scripts) that a browser could run as it was rendering the page. This would enable the creator of the page to build in all kinds of useful functionality.
For example, you could make a help window pop up in response to a click and control the size and other properties of the window; you could check and validate the data that the user typed into web-forms to make sure the input was properly formatted before being submitted; or you could arrange that images would change as the mouse passed over them. And so on.
Eich’s scripting language was first called Mocha and then LiveScript, but wound up being called JavaScript. The ability to run JavaScript was first implemented in Version 2 of the Netscape browser in December 1995. It was an innovation that transformed the web.
Virtually every web page now comes loaded with JavaScript. If you’re interested in seeing how far this has gone, download and install a clever plug-in (ie helper) program called NoScript for the Firefox browser. Once installed, NoScript monitors every page and alerts you to all the scripts embedded into it. You can then choose to allow or forbid your browser to run each one.
NoScript provides an insight into what’s happened to the web. There are still pages that don’t have embedded scripts, but most do, and some have a bewildering number. What this shows is the extent to which the web has evolved from a publishing medium to a programming platform, which is one reason why many malware attacks now come from malicious scripts embedded in pages. As ever, Google has been at the forefront in exploiting this technology. We first saw this in Gmail, which uses a development of JavaScript called Ajax to enable a web-page to interact with a distant server without ever moving away from the page. Among other things, this makes the business of compiling web metrics more complex: a Gmail user can send and receive hundreds of email messages while staying on the same page.
From the outset, Google clearly had plans for Ajax. The evidence was in the steady accretion of Gmail features like instant messaging, audio-and then video-chat, and so on. But until the end of last month we were still unsure about where all this was headed.
Now we know. It’s called Google Wave. It’s described as “a real-time communication platform which combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client”.
Translation: It’s a sophisticated set of tools enabling people to work collaboratively across the internet. And “real-time” means exactly that in most cases what you type appears - as you type it - on other people’s screens.
The product’s name allegedly comes from the Firefly TV series, in which a “wave” was an electronic communication. In Google’s implementation, a wave is a complete thread of multimedia messages held on a central server. They can be shared and collaborators added or removed. Waves can be embedded in blogs and websites.
The technology will be Open Source, so that developers can build their own applications within waves. Files of every description-text, movies, audio-can be dropped into a wave, making them accessible to everyone. There’s spell-checking and translation on the fly. You can replay everything that’s happened within a wave. And it all happens in your browser.
Or so the 90-minute initial demonstration claimed. Having watched it, one was left with three thoughts: Wonderment at the scale of Google’s ambition; admiration of its technical ingenuity; and scepticism about the prospects of something this complex becoming a mainstream product. But one thing is now clear: The browser has become the platform. And that’s big news.