World Wide Web turns 30 and gets a doodle from Google

Thirty years ago today, a 33-year-old software engineer submitted “Information Management: A Proposal.”

The engineer’s boss called it “vague but exciting.”

That engineer was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and his proposal was the beginning of the World Wide Web.

To mark the 30th anniversary of Berners-Lee’s pitch, Google created a doodle for its homepage.

Not to be confused with the internet, which had been evolving since the 1960s, the World Wide Web is an online application built with HTML language, URL "addresses" and hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP, Google wrote. The web has also become a "decentralized community, founded on principles of universality, consensus and bottom-up design," Google said.

Berners-Lee’s boss allowed him time to develop the humble flowchart into a working model, writing the HTML language, the HTTP application, and WorldWideWeb.app — the first web browser and page editor. By 1991, the external servers were up and running.

"There are very few innovations that have truly changed everything," said Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Today, there are nearly 2 billion websites online. Whether you use it for email, homework, gaming or checking out videos of cute puppies, chances are you can’t imagine life without the web.

You can also be part of the celebration. The Web Foundation is crowdsourcing a Twitter timeline of the most important milestones in the web's history. Details are on the Web Foundations web page.

The search engine's doodle tradition began in 1998 when, according to the company itself, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin played around with the corporate logo "to indicate their attendance at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert."

Now there is an entire team of illustrators bringing biographies, history and interesting tidbits to life on Google’s homepage.

Here is a look back at some of the most popular 2018 doodles we covered: