So why is this book called Web Radio and not Internet Radio ? I certainly could have chosen the latter title: it is a term widely used in this context. But the World Wide Web (henceforth the Web) more accurately describes the international public experience of the Internet. Terms like website, web page and web address (which will usually begin www. ) characterize by far the largest colony of Internet users, who have adopted the same set of agreed computer languages and standards to find and present information to each other.

The languages and standards of the Web were originated by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues in 1990 for the European Laboratory for Particle Physics at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. He was asked to provide that international community of experts with easy access to a common network of information sites among the many that were being set up by other communities of Internet users in different computer languages. The two main standards he drew up were for Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML), the computer language in which text pages were encoded, and Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the standard form of address which enabled the HTML message to find its way from one computer, through the phone system, to other computers online in the network. Because they worked so well, these standards were quickly taken up by other groups of users when making information generally available on the Internet. By the time the personal computer boom...