Charles Arthur: 'The web-browsers game was small, until Microsoft arrived late in the day'

The browser is 10 years old this month. Happy birthday, browser! Actually, the concept is rather older; the birthday being celebrated is that of Mosaic, which was released in April of 1993 from the National Centre for Supercomputer Applications in the wonderfully named Champaign, Illinois. It was developed by a team including Marc Andreessen, who later went on to develop Netscape. And we all know where that led.

Actually, there were plenty of browsers before Mosaic; the first was written on a NeXT computer by Tim Berners-Lee, whose idea the web first was. There's a good timeline at http://livinginternet.com/?w/wi_browse.htm, which also makes clear how late to the game Microsoft was. Except that the game was small, then; by arriving, Microsoft made the stadium worldwide, so that the game was no longer being played on just a few university computers. Because you needed TCP/IP – the internet protocol – to use a browser, that got integrated into Windows, and abruptly the whole face of computing changed. No longer personal, but potentially worldwide.

Now there are dozens of browsers – and that's only if you're counting the ones for personal computers. Add in those for handhelds and mobile phones, and you're probably going to be up to the 100 mark. Yet it's clear that while we may be 10 years along the software path, we haven't actually come that far since Tim Berners-Lee compiled some Objective-C code on Christmas Day, 1990. As the page above shows, a "line-mode" browser that would work on any device was available in 1991 (OK, there were fewer than 10 web pages), and by May 1992 there was one that could run applets of code, just like those Java or ActiveX ones that make your machine grind to a halt today.

Has web-browser development stopped, then? It may feel as if we now do just the same things as when we first struggled with a URL. Yet so much is now completely familiar: online banking, online shopping, web forums, online searching. The browsers are getting better at dealing with the multiplicity of demands, but the underlying languages that are used to make web pages are evolving only slowly, partly because the web is so big now.

One change that is coming, but subtly, is the development of "web services". These were the subject of much hype about 18 months ago, when Bill Gates realised how powerful they might become; Microsoft built an entire strategy, called .Net (pronounced dot-net) around them. Much of the hype has subsided, which is good news, as very few programmers do any decent coding when distracted by the prospect of the riches promised from web services.

Essentially, they're a way of getting multiple websites, or their back-end databases, to talk seamlessly to each other. In the version suggested by Bill Gates, you schedule a trip to a city, and your calendar will then go and find the best airfares, book your favourite hotel in that city (or the one offering the things that you like), and perhaps even a restaurant table, too.

At this point you're probably thinking, "How about you just get my computer to run properly first, before it tries to book me a restaurant in a town I've never been to?" But web services should actually be easier to implement than getting applications on the same computer to play nicely with each other. Swapping data between machines tends to involve higher-order, human-readable data. You just wrap it up in tags written in XML (the parent of HTML, which is what makes web pages readable on any operating system) to indicate that this piece of data here is about restaurants in City A, and this piece of data here is about hotels in City A.

Sure, that glosses over the difficulties in implementing such schemes (should the XML tags contain the menu? Whether there's muzak? The wine list?) but it is all feasible. And that's the important thing. On the Apple platform, Karelia Software (with its "Watson" product) and Apple itself with its Sherlock 3 product have both done some neat things with web services.

I'm most impressed by an independent plug-in for Sherlock 3 that lets you see London's traffic cameras, so you can see how jammed the roads are in real time. (You'll find it at http://www.fraserit.com/sherlock_channels/londonjamcams/: click on the "JamCams.xml" file. Yes, you can get the same images at http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/travel/jamcams/ (in fact, they're what the Sherlock "plugin" uses) – but the Sherlock service is a more sensible layout and doesn't spawn new browser windows.

No URLs are required except the one to get started, and you have all the traffic in London. I couldn't find a comparable service for Windows, just a lot of talk about their importance in the future. Well, everyone, they're here; they just take a bit of building. Appropriate, perhaps, that such things are getting built on Apple's new operating system. For the NeXT operating system that Tim Berners-Lee used is now the foundation of Mac OSX. Plus ça change.

network@independent.co.uk