A (brief and opinionated) history of Web trends

Pre 70s

The seeds:

• US (e.g. Licklider’s “Galactic Network”)
• Mostly military contracts (e.g. D/ARPA –> ARPANET) and “research’y”
• Develop protocols for machine communication

70s - Birth of the internet

[Source]

80s

• Growth of the “web”
• From experimental validation to scaled up insfrastructure
• Free software (e.g. “Free as in Freedom”)

90s

• Civilian and commercial growth
• Web 1.0
• Open Source software (e.g. “The cathedral and the Bazaar”)

00s

• Web 2.0
• Mobile
• Web mapping takes off (hello Google Maps!)

+10s

• Consolidation of GAFA –> concentration
• IoT
• Death of the desktop?

Ideas to retain

• The Web is technology to build decentralised systems
• Economics (for the most part) have turned it into a concentrated economy
• Computing today is physically distributed but socio-economically concentrated

The server/client model

The server/client model

[Source]

Benefits

• Interoperability of disparate platforms
• Optimise on hard/software for each task (“distribute”)
• Separate data collection (e.g. sensor), storage (e.g. data centre), intensive computing (e.g. compute cluster), interaction (e.g. mobile)

“Disadvantages”

• Requires (cheap & ubiquitous) connectivity
• More complex than an isolated approach (e.g. desktop)
• Harder to “keep afloat”

An example…

[Source]

Another example…

Contrast it with…

The modern (web) mapping eco-system

Building blocks of a web map

Backend	Frontend
Server	Client
Data, mapping (GIS)	Style (CSS), web (HTML)

The current web mapping landscape

• Software: a lot of open-source projects
• Platforms: a concentrated few (web infrastructure is hard and expensive!)
• Business model: software as a service

The current web mapping landscape

Trade-off

convenience + agility

Vs

flexibility + ownership

This course: mostly rely on commercial platforms to focus on design and cartographic rather than engineering concepts